Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

Aviary online image editor

Aviary.com offers free vector editing (their Illustrator replacement is called Raven) and photo editing (called Phoenix) - has anyone used these tools? This might be a great resource for small businesses looking to make edits to their designs, or even create designs.

Search Engine Optimization Tool

http://website.grader.com/ - type in your URL and they'll generate a report for you on how your website measures up search-engine-wise. Very useful!

What's that font?

Have you ever seen a font in a magazine or on a website and thought, "Hey, this is the font I want to be able to tell my designer to try in my logo. The only problem is, I don't know what it's called!"

Well, now you can find out at WhatTheFont.com. Upload an image to their database, and it will pick the best match for your scan from the MyFonts.com database. Sometimes it won't get a match, but it's a got a pretty wide library to match from, and even if it can't find the exact font it will specify some that are very close.

Your own handwriting as a font!

You never know when you might stumble across a need for a handwriting font - maybe you're designing "personalized invitations" for an event, or you want to add a signature that looks sort of, but not exactly like yours to your website. Or, you may just want to get your handwriting as a font because it's cool and pretty inexpensive. Just $9!

http://www.fontifier.com/

Creative Techs

If you're trying to figure out how to use Photoshop, Illustrator or any of those fancy design programs to design your own materials, here's a great resource with a free newsletter full of tips:

http://www.creativetechs.com/

Also, you might try the eLearning on lynda.com - if you want to learn a particular application in-depth (say, Dreamweaver so that you can do your own website maintenance)

Online Pantone Color Chart

Pantone colors are indispensible when you want to get accurate color on a print job - and using this online Pantone color chip book to communicate your color preferences to your designer (or, even just exactly what "lime green" means to you):

http://www.australiasigns.com.au/qsonline/PMS-color-chart.html

A shout-out to my printer

Jennifer Points at Allegra Print and Imaging is the best. Always getting projects done quickly, they look excellent and are always delivered to the client perfectly. All at a small-business-friendly price.

If you ever need 2- or 3- color collateral materials printed especially, she's your gal. She does a ton of other types of printing, but I'm especially impressed with her work in those areas.

Oh, and her phone number is 650-358-8685. Located in Foster City, CA.

Scribus.net?

Has anyone used the Scribus.net platform to design flyers, brochures, handouts or other print items for their small business? It looks like it might be a good resource for small business owners who want to make some of their own promotional materials to save money, but I haven't tried it out myself.

If you don't use that, but you do lay out your own materials, what do you use?

Custom t-shirts

I'm still catching up on the "sea of bulletin board", and found another scrap pinned to the mess:

Custom t-shirt printing by http://skreened.com/

If you need just a couple of t-shirts for employees, a trade show, a test run, or even if you just like the idea of having t-shirts printed up but you don't need dozens of them, this looks like a pretty good resource. I haven't printed shirts with them (and would be curious to hear about print quality if you have), but it looks like they have a good variety of shirts available, and it looks like ordering might not be too difficult.

Other shirt vendors I've tried include:

Cafepress.com: Decent print quality, but I'm not thrilled with the shirts available.

Zazzle.com: Better shirt selection, but I don't love their ordering interface (at least not on my Mac)...

Got a great short-run shirt vendor that I should know about and try out? Let me know about it in the comments...