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Why Use Hot Designs? The Work Process >>
Hot Designs provides professional services at less-than-agency rates, offering great solutions for companies of all sizes. Working with an agency can be costly, with an invoice consisting of multiple salaries, coffee and do-nuts, lunch meetings, gallery office decor, prime downtown or trendy locations, and just about everything including the kitchen sink. Here, the overhead is low so your bill will not rival the national debt. But the product you receive will rival that of an agency. Let's face it. The economy has forced every company to maximize every dollar, so everyone is looking for more bang for their buck.
Great Design Sells
These days almost anyone can put up a website, create a logo, newsletter and anything else their software will allow. But bad design rears its' ugly head in ways that you may not even realize. Good design creates a professional image. It creates a feeling, a desire to purchase, a need, a response, a call to action. It gets noticed, gets results, makes navigation through a site easy and understandable, and effectively communicates the message.
Good Designers
A good designer knows when to use the tools and when not to. Using all of the bells and whistles, clip art, colors, sounds, effects, and whatever else is thrown into your software doesn't make anyone look professional.
A good designer knows how to wade through the rubble and sort it out: pick out what's salvageable and reuse, rework or repurpose the recycleables, and scrap the junk. They can channel random thoughts, read between lines, sift through piles of information and materials and come out with an organized plan, and understand what you mean by "I don't really know what I'm trying to say but..." They offer solutions to improve your image, while listening to your needs, and create in the end what is best for your company. A good designer knows what works and what doesn't. They know what kind of image a font, color or layout will project.
Make Your Dollars Work for You
So, you payed a hefty fee to place an ad in a magazine. Yet to "save money" you decidde to create the ad yourself or let your cousin do it because he likes to play with graphics software, even though he's a financial advisor by day. The ad doesn't really pop, well, except for that loud neon yellow used to jump out at the reader. In fact, not much great going on with the ad, so the results come in, you didn't really get many calls for your product. The ad, when noticed, wasn't really impressive. It even looked like it was homemade, which made the reader equate that term with your product. Though you are a professional and you have a high quality item to sell, the ad sure didn't portray it. Money lost, opportunities lost, nothing gained. Other than the fact you start to think maybe you should have hired a professional.
Experience
As with any professional you hire, your expectation is that they know what they are doing. Hot Designs is owned and operated by Shanna Blasingame, a designer whos' experience goes back to the days before graphics software was invented, when logos were drawn, get this, by hand! Through the years she has honed her skills, kept up with the changing internet demands, and no matter what you throw at her, she has already been there and done that.
The experienced designer starts at the end to get to the beginning rather than the other way around. What does that mean? It means starting with the GOAL and working backwards from there. Along the way, anything that doesn't match the goal is immediately eliminated.
The process of the inexperienced designer, neighbor's daughter or the DIYer who "knows enough to be dangerous" may look like this: open up whatever software is cheapest, free or came on their computer, play with the tools, see what all fun fonts there are, use as many as possible, even if they are unreadable, add a starburst, use up every square inch of white space because "more is better," make the logo as large as possible, even if it means stretching it disproportionally, and save the file either too low of resolution for the printer or too high for the website. And something has to move and flash on the site! Surely there is something free to grab off of the internet and use on the site. The inexperience shows whether you believe it or not.
Extremely Personal Service
At Hot Designs, you work directly with the person who is actually working on your project, not an account representative. It is hard enough to communicate sometimes directly to someone, much less adding a layer (or two or three) of people that are interpreting your words, re-stating them, passing it along to someone, etc. Since you actually get to speak to the designer, very efficient and clear communication is the outcome, leading to a smooth transaction.
Here is what some Hot Designs clients have said.