Print & product sourcing for creative people — Sophwell

January 11, 2009

As a graphic designer, do you design for the client or for yourself? In the January 2009 edition of Wired Magazine, the Rants section has an item entitled “Sarcastic Letter of the Month.” Here is the excerpt: Social Bookmarking

Inspiration and creativity for the new year

January 2, 2009

On New Year’s Day I sat down to watch a YouTube video entitled “Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer a month before he gave this lecture on September 18, 2007. His doctors had given him three to six [...]

Do creative ideas grow on trees?

December 23, 2008

One of the reasons I like having the brand expression consultancy Blackcoffee as a client is that they bring so much creativity into everything they do. They contacted me after deciding they wanted a life-sized car freshener-styled display tree for their holiday party. They called me on Wednesday. The party was scheduled for Friday. You’ve [...]

Quick holiday gift ideas for your clients

December 3, 2008

In the current economic climate, companies are looking carefully at promotional spending. There’s a temptation to shave budgets by curtailing marketing. In the November issue of Entrepreneur Magazine, Robert Kiyosaki writes how that could be a big mistake for your business. According to Kiyosaki, author of the RichDad book series, “Promotion is a six week [...]

A direct mail promotion that had recipients seeing red

November 18, 2008

UPDATE: This post was voted part of a “Best Answer” to a question posed on LinkedIn. (See it HERE) Mark Gallagher and Laura Savard of Blackcoffee, a brand expression consultancy in Boston, asked Sophwell to help produce a promotion that would excite and arouse both clients and prospects. The color red and the sight of [...]

Is your message a marketing mondegreen?

November 2, 2008

Merriam Webster has recently added the word “mondegreen” to its pages with the definition “a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung.” The word was coined by author Sylvia Wright in 1954 when she discovered that she had long misunderstood the lyrics to an old Scottish ballad, “They have [...]

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How can I help you be more creative?

October 14, 2008

My first job when I started out in the graphics field was pasting up ads (actually, we used melted wax) for the Massachusetts Daily Collegian at UMass Amherst in 1977. It was a 36-page daily newspaper that was published on weekdays and distributed for free around the campus. Student sales reps would go out to [...]

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