By Michelle Peck

It’s that time of year, when we all spend our free time thinking about what gifts to buy, decorating the house with festive lights, planning parties, and singing along to a favorite Christmas carol. The holidays bring love, joy, and excitement year after year and sparks the inner designer in all of us. Design and art direction are all about providing a strategic look and feel to tell a story which is much like the well-planned gift giving and ornate ambiance of the holidays. So follow Santa’s lead to designing the perfect holiday this season with a few simple guidelines.

Think About Your Audience

Before hitting the shopping malls to purchase all the gifts on your list, you need to sit and spend time thinking about your audience and developing a strategy. Think about what each person wants, what their interests are, and how they like to spend their time. It’s important to understand how to speak to your audience, whether it’s finding the perfect gift, or promoting your brand.

Spark Emotion

By relating to your audience, you’ll be able to create a personal connection through your gift giving. You give gifts to people you care about and the right choice will evoke an emotional response in your recipient. Good art direction is all about finding this emotion and tapping into it. Good gifts should do the same thing.

Tell a Story

Christmas carols don’t only provide a festive tune, they tell a story and invite everyone to sing along. They make you feel joyous and bring out the holiday spirit. Creating a voice to convey a story is crucial in marketing a product or service. Conceptual writing makes you feel something beyond learning the facts. A catchy tune doesn’t only tell you what the Christmas story is all about, but you also feel the love and giving the season captures.

Choose a Color Scheme

Yes, it’s true everyone thinks about red and green as the traditional holiday color palette, but bringing true design into your holiday requires so much more. It’s about creating the ideal look for bringing holiday cheer into your home. Define what colors fit your personality and give the vibe your going for. Do you want your home to feel fun, formal, unique or traditional when the family arrives? A color scheme can make a huge impact on the tone of your design and create the appropriate mood.

Establish Your Brand

Ever wonder why the holidays are filled with snowflakes, santa hats, presents, and decorated trees? Visuals are a key element to good design. They are used to support the branding and concept by providing a consistent look throughout all components of a campaign. Visual cues create a culture that is quick to understand in any language. Ornaments and candy canes represent the holidays even without any mention of Christmas. They are ownable elements that can only be used when speaking about your brand.

Check Your Work

Santa knows the value of making a list and checking it twice. The last step for any designer is to proof, test, and share your work with others. The critiques and feedback you receive will only make you a better designer. So, be sure to check those holiday cards before sending them out and have a family member taste your favorite dish before placing it on the table.

In the spirit of the holidays, everyone can be a designer. Know your audience to find the perfect gift, create bliss with a well-told story, and incorporate the right visual elements into your home. You’ll be sure to have a very happy holiday season.

Saw this post on Wellsdrew.com and thought I would share it for you fellow designers looking to save a few keystrokes when handling brochure design and more. Hope it helps!

Jacob Tyler designed four different T-shirts for the San Diego Italian Film Festival (we also did the Web site) and we’re wondering if YOU can guess which one they chose to use. Comment via twitter @jtcg or Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Jacob.Tyler.Creative.Group#! and let us know which shirt they picked. We’ll send one lucky winner a FREE t-shirt! If you feel like it, you can let us know what shirt you would pick too.

By Nicole Fletcher

According to Wikipedia, I am a member of Generation Y, otherwise known as the Millenial Generation. I’ve always been fairly fond of this categorization but in doing more research I found that my co gen-y-ers range in birth date from the mid 70s to the early 2000s. I was shocked. How could someone pushing 40 and someone who has yet to hit double digits share the same generational categorization? The Spice Girls sang ‘Generation X’ in the 90s, my 30 year old cousin doesn’t have a Facebook account and my 10 year old cousin blogs regularly. No matter what way the cookie crumbles – there’s just no way to categorize nearly a half century of people into one kitschy word.

In a recent Mashable article, author Nick Parish discussed three things brands must do to appeal to millenials online. Millenials want what they want, when they want it. Whether that’s the latest deal on Groupon, cell reception. a new song or reliable 3g, we are the instant gratification generation. In the article, Nick talks about how brands have to be on this because, simply put, if one store isn’t, there are 1000s+more that are ready and willing to snatch that business. The focus has clearly changed from the convenience and location (think the 24 hour 7-11 store) value of yesteryear, to getting what you want exactly when you want it.

Glen Parker, research director at Universal McCann, performed a study on over 350,000 consumers. They found that, “Most (brands) inherently aren’t social, but users are expecting to see them in the same places [the users] are in. For all customers, the one thing they all want is good service, but in all other aspects they are completely different.”

This boys and girls puts us in a bit of a pickle doesn’t it? What they’re saying is this: consumers supersede generational boundaries when it comes to brand presence being where they are, but since they is everyone, then they are everywhere. What that means for us dear brands, marketers, etc, is that we have to be everywhere.

What I recommend is this: really and truly analyze your target market. Where/who does your ROI come from? Are they Baby Boomers, Millenials or are they somewhere in between? Then find out where those people congregate. Is it online? If so, where? Facebook, blogs, forums, Twitter? Find them and reach out, or seek the assistance of a brand communications agency if you aren’t sure how. Ask your community what they want from you, engage with them and eventually, after this relationship builds and grows, they’ll be there waiting as loyal brand advocates. If your market is offline (ie: an older clientele), be wary that the young people of today will eventually be your market that both digital branding and social media will surely be part of your company’s future, whether you’re willing to accept it or not.

As for me and the rest of the marketers out there, a simple lesson lies at the root of this complicated message: complacency killed the cat. So refuse comfort, never settle and don’t give up on being creative, innovative and fresh in this ever evolving, wide world of web we’ve woven.