As a business builds and manages its brand, setting a budget is paramount. This would avoid unnecessary expenses and helps to prioritize branding spending.
The brand should encompass most areas of a business, from stationery all the way to how products or services are delivered to customers, so defining a budget can be a challenge.

The key areas a business could budget for are:

• Design needs, such as a logo, signage, a website, business stationery or product packaging
• Changes to the premises
• Advertising
• Time spent training employees
• Any resources that might be needed to enable employees to carry out what the brand promises, e.g: customer service costs
• Maintaining marketing material and the businesses online presence, like the website, Facebook, etc.

Everything needn't be done at once. As long as employees understand and deliver what the brand promises, it stands a good chance of success.

A business can create stationery, logos, packaging and advertising quite cheaply if the budget is tight. However, it is a good idea to think about future growth when devising a brand and its image, as changing it later can prove costly. When customers and employees have built up a relationship with the brand, it can be problematic to change down the road. Rather get things done right, from the start.

WhatBox branding top tips:

• When creating a brand look at who the business is and what makes its brand unique.
• Use market research to fully understand the business' industry, to find out what its customers want and to measure the success of its brand.
• Whether serious or fun, communicate the brand consistently and with style to ensure that a clear message is delivered.

"I will not make any more boring art." Baldessari famously said in 1971. "If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn’t do art."

3 things every young artist should know according to John Baldessari:
1- Talent is cheap.
2- You have to be possessed which you can’t will.
3- Being at the right place at the right time.

"Much of Baldessari's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so . . . Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid 1960s. From 1970 he worked in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. He has created thousands of works that demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe." ~ wikipedia

All images in this blog post are personal projects created without use of any stock images. These projects are not intended to be commercialized in any way, that includes book covers, album art and advertisement. Although, if you like Erik Johansson's work feel free to share it with others on blogs and similar as long as you give him credits as the artist. Feel free to contact Erik for a commissioned project.

(C) Copyright 2011/12, Erik Johansson All rights reserved.

Soma FM is a listener-supported, commercial-free internet-only radio station, broadcasting out of San Francisco. There are no advertising or annoying commercial interruptions, and the station is part of our "gotta have" work environment. Good Cuban coffee, the accessional Guru, and Soma FM! What more could you ask for?

With over 20 unique channels, there's a station for any occasion, but to be honest we're on Space Station or Groove Salad 99% of the time. For a laugh, you gotta try out Secret Agent and Doomed.

- How big is the Soma FM music library?

"We have over 7000 CDs and 120,000 digital tracks in our primary music library, although many SomaFM music directors have personal libraries as well. From this, we select only the best tracks to play on SomaFM. In the last 2 years, we've played over 13,000 different artists on SomaFM."

- And how does Soma stay in business?

"We run our station on a very tight budget and rely on donations from listeners, the support of small labels, and from a few companies that provide us with large amounts of bandwidth to broadcast around the world."

Now and then good 'ol Rusty comes and begs a dollar or more out of listeners, and signing up to support the legend and his station is the least one can do. Soma does a great job, plays fantastic music 24/7 (we've been listening for years and years) and the world would be a sad place if they were ever to go.

"Thanks for listening, and remember...

SomaFM Loves You!!!!"

Animated gifs contain a series of images (or frames) that are "played" one after the other and give a semblance of animation, just as in traditional animation techniques. When creating animated gifs, one is able to control the time for which each frame is displayed.

We don't get too many opportunities to create and use animated gifs, but the video below illustrates that (like any art form) animated gifs have a fanatical following amongst some!

Besides open-source providing a client with the freedom and peace of mind to move to other designers/developers should they choose, and the fact that it is far less costly (read free) perhaps of greater significance is the fact that an open-source platform is being constantly updated and developed - although this does vary between platforms. As far as we're concerned nothing beats WordPress in terms of simplicity and ease of use, it has a huge base of developers, with a great plug-in architecture and plug-ins for everything, and a fast development cycle. In the web world this is huge - things are moving fast, new technologies and techniques are launched almost daily, and an open-source program ensures that keeping up to date is possible.  

As a good example, lets take a look at the world of mobile devices.

We read recently that the mobile web is growing at a phenomenal pace, and is forecast to overtake the desktop web by 2014. In other words, more users will access the Internet using a mobile phone rather than a PC for the first time.

Approximately 900 million people currently access the web with mobile phones, compared to 1.4 billion desktop Internet users. By 2014, mobile web users will should outpace desktop users (approximately 1.7 billion mobile users to approximately 1.65 billion desktop users). By 2015, the number of mobile web users is expected to grow to 2 billion.

The point here is that an open-source platform like WordPress is keeping up with this. We now have the ability with WordPress/HTML 5 to build a website that is "responsive". It auto-resizes and configures pages and content depending on the device (screen-size) accessing the page. No longer does one need to having a .mobi domain and a specific website built on this for mobile devices to be re-routed to. I doubt whether many proprietary CMS platforms are keeping up anywhere as close. 

Even if you have to customize open source, you’re still getting tens of thousands of hours of development for free with programmers having effectively collaborated together to create the best platform they could.

Consider the following scenario: if you’re visiting a website using an open-source browser like Mozilla Firefox, the hosting internet server is likely to be powered by open-source Linux software, and you may well be viewing it from a mobile device using the Google Android, which, of course, is also open source.

We believe forcing clients to pay for licences to obsolete proprietary software is not the right way to go. The industry as a whole is turning more toward extensively supported open-source platforms compared to commercial options.

Food for thought.