Have you noticed that most work posted by Biller Designs has a little version of our logo near the bottom of the image or some other unobtrusive place? This is called a watermark.

Many companies, especially those who specialize in visual art, put watermarks on their work when they share them on social media or on their own websites. There are a couple of reasons for this.

Prevent Unauthorized Usage or Theft

If a company is worried that their work will be used without their permission, they can put a complicated logo or other image across the middle and obscure the main parts of the image. Many photographers and graphic artists take this approach with previews of their work. You’ve probably seen this on places like Shutterstock:

Gain Exposure

Another reason to watermark your work is that you never know what will catch on and go viral. If your work becomes widely shared, it is great exposure for your business! The key difference is that if your intent is mainly to gain exposure, you’ll want to put your watermark somewhere on the image that is out of the way and doesn’t detract from the main content.

This allows for the full experience of your work but still lets anyone viewing the work know who made it. Unfortunately, some crummy people can just cut your watermark off since it wasn’t right across the middle of your image, but if you were only in it to get some exposure or show off your work and not get paid for it, it’s best to just roll with it. Don’t share something that is super high resolution and devious folks won’t be able to use it for much more than just sharing, anyway. At least this way, if someone down the road wants to attribute proper credit, they can do a Google Image search and your correctly watermarked image should come up.

There is a real concern for people stealing work. It happens all the time, and sometimes by big companies. There are tons of examples of major brands stealing art and not crediting- or compensating- the artist properly. Honestly, there’s not much that can be done outside of social media outcry because legally fighting a large company who can afford to find all of the legal loopholes isn’t worth the time or money.

As an artist, there will always be the potential for plagiarism because some people are crappy, but lots of people are great and actively want to attribute work to the right person, so keep at it. If you are interested in making stuff for other people, they need to see what you’re able to do, so do what you love and make some cool art!

So, I wanted to do a post about one of my very favorite things: Mood Boards! I will basically put together a mood board for just about anything. I find them to be not only super fun to design but also very helpful for figuring out what a brand or even just a logo should feel like. It’s easy to say, “I want my brand to be fun, approachable, and quirky with a bit of a 70s pop art feel,” but it makes much more of an impact to see this:

Confession time: before Biller Designs got serious about doing website and design work full time, the brand wasn’t cohesive at all. I had slapped together a logo with all of the planning and intent of none at all and originally had this:

This isn’t terrible, but it was incredibly difficult to do anything with. The orientation is basically fixed, there aren’t any colors for thematic continuity, and the letters were sized in such a way that it wasn’t possible to just use pieces because breaking it up made it unrecognizable. On top of that, the website was kind of a hot mess in terms of visual consistency, but it didn’t occur to me that it was problematic until I did a branding exercise that began with a mood board.

When the mood board was finished and I was able to see the board all together, I was instantly able to define the voice and visual style of Biller Designs. Also, the shortcomings of the current brand were immediately apparent. With the board as a guide, I was able to make what I consider to be a very visually consistent and memorable website and brand style. My goal is to have such a specific visual voice, you could say, that when someone sees a worksheet I made for this blog or a piece of pop art in a Biller Designs social media post, they say, “Oh yeah, that is a Biller Designs graphic.” I also think it’s super important to watermark almost anything you create, but that’s a topic for another post. Seriously, I am writing it for next week.

Examples

Let me give you another couple of examples. This is a board I did for Winfield Wax Spa in Winfield, KS. We set up a mutual secret Pinterest board and she pinned about 40 images that she liked for one reason or another. She commented on each pin what it was about each image that appealed to her.

Using this collection of images, we were able to nail down exactly how she wanted her new brand to feel: light, airy, floral, feminine.

This last example is for another project from Tina and me called The Retail Chefs. We want to be able to use our specialty retail experience to help businesses coach and motivate their sales teams. We both love cooking (and cookware) and the food/chef/cooking theme really lends itself to the sales and marketing wordplay. It’s a lot of fun, honestly, but that brand originally suffered from some of the same visual continuity problems as the first iteration of Biller Designs. Here is the mood board I created to really define the visual language for The Retail Chefs:

This whole brand is just a gas. I love working on it. The retro, atomic age radio and the sweet strawberry shakes on the teal diner chairs were the main informers of this palette. Here are some of the graphics that are based on this mood board: 

The colors and shapes just scream 1950s diner (which keeps the food thing going) and, again, it is very easy to see what is “on” brand and what isn’t.

It is our practice at Biller Designs to do a mood board for every client that is getting website design or logo design from us. As you can probably tell, it is very illuminating and absolutely worth the time to dutifully go through the whole process.

Until next time!
-CB <3

P.S. If you want to see the boards I am working on, check out Biller Designs on Instagram. I just like mood boards so they pop up in my feed pretty often.

And just because Mood Boards make me so happy:

Content is the most important thing on your website. Period.

You can have the prettiest, smoothest, fastest website on the internet, but if your content isn’t up to snuff, even the best design and fanciest tech won’t be able to save it. That’s not to say that tech and design aren’t important, but your customers go to your website to easily access information, not to marvel at a really well-animated navigation menu. On top of all of this, search engines prioritize good content, so making sure that what is on your website is beneficial and high quality can help your SEO rankings as well.

To help you figure out what should be on your website, I’m going to go over some general guidelines for where information is normally found on the most common individual pages. The easiest way to start is to figure out what pages you want and fill them in one by one. As I’ve talked about before, Biller Designs’ client onboarding process includes a shared Google Document called a Content Plan for just this purpose; to get everyone organized and keep the information up to date and correct.

Home

This is your virtual first impression. You want your colors, fonts, and general visual style to be cohesive and recognizable throughout the whole website and the first time visitors see that style is on your homepage. Some things that can help achieve this are:

Business Logo – This is who you are. Make sure it’s front and center.
Tagline – A few words to sum up what you do or who you serve
Branding Identity – This is that visual style I was talking about. I’m going to talk more about it next week, so stay tuned!
“Above the Fold” Information – This is a term adapted from newspapers to refer to what you see on your screen before you scroll. You want to make sure that you have your best stuff “above the fold” and that it is arranged in such a way to encourage visitors to scroll and see more. Making that happen is more of a designer thing, but it’s good for you to think about when you’re writing content for any particular page.

About

Like I have talked about before, this is where you can help your customer get to know you and your business a little more personally. If you love dogs or are passionate about a local nonprofit, this is a great place for that kind of information. This page is also where you introduce your customers to the good folks behind the scenes on your team.

Mission/Purpose – This can sometimes be its own page, but if it’s short, this is a good place for it.
Your Whole Team – Depending on how many team members you have, sometimes this is just a section of photos, names, and titles with links to their individual pages. If you have a small team, you could potentially just do a short profile of each person on this page alone. It really depends on how many total pages you want on your site. Either way, this is where your bio goes.

Products/Services

This type of page is really dependant on your business model. If you sell products (virtual or physical) and also offer services, it can be more streamlined to have them on two separate pages. Here are some examples of Products or Services content:

If you are an e-commerce business, this is where your store is.
If you are a restaurant, this is your menu.
If you are a salon, this is where your prices and services are listed and described.

Contact

This page is where your potential customers find out when and how to reach you. That is really important! It is best to have several ways to get in touch, such as email, phone, or even a form to fill out to make it super easy.

This is also the place to have information about your business hours, and the addresses of physical business locations.
Be sure and have all of your social media here, too. That said, your social media needs to be (tastefully) all over the website- in the footer, sidebar, etc.- to encourage customer engagement.

Having a beautiful website is great. It fosters trust in you and ups the professionalism factor significantly. But to get the full benefits of a beautiful website, you need to have high quality, accurate information about you and your business. That’s what will keep customers interested and buying from you!

-CB

You know that you need to have an online presence to help support your business, but you’re not really sure how to go about getting one. Or, it could be that your current website just needs to be freshened up. What do you do?

You could make a go of it yourself. There are lots of user-friendly drag and drop editors, but it will probably take a bit of time to get familiar with the platform to set it up properly. You could definitely go with a designer (we can recommend a pretty good one). They are already up to speed on how the platforms work and how best to set up everything on the technical side. They’re also generally much faster and you’ll get your very professional and wonderful site up and running very quickly. Ultimately, it’s your call for what’s best for your business.

Either way, you’re going to have to get yourself organized. If you’ve decided to work with a web designer, congratulations! Hopefully, they will have a plan to discover the best setup for your website, get all of the information about your business, and put together a fantastic project for you. Even if they don’t have a point by point plan, they are still going to need some information from you. At Biller Designs, we do an initial discovery session where we find out everything we can about your business. Then, based on our findings and your business goals, we set up a shared Google document that we call a Content Plan to help make sure all of the information you want on your website makes it on there accurately.

In the meantime, I’m going to give you some helpful hints on how to decide what needs to be on your website, how to organize it, and where to find content if you don’t have enough to fill your site. This is helpful whether you’re DIYing your website or working with a designer.

I will talk more in depth about the Content Plan next week, but before you get too in the weeds, it’s good to have an overall idea of what information you want on your website. Once you have a basic idea, you can start to organize the pieces of information. Finally, you can figure out what specific content goes on each individual page.

What’s the Big Idea?

Until you actually have to sit down and write it, thinking about what information needs to go on your website sounds pretty easy. “Sure,” you think, “this will be super easy and fast.” Then, four hours later, you’ve consumed six cups of coffee, torn yourself away from social media a dozen times, Googled, “What goes on a website,” and still only have a sentence or two written down. Let’s break it down.

Pages

Most websites will have between 4 and 6 primary pages. Home, About, Contact, and Products or Services are some examples of items that most businesses will need. I like to start with those when listing the pages I will need on my site, and add additional pages underneath them as I go. Once you’ve listed all of the pages you need, it’s time to organize them into navigation.

Navigation

You don’t want to get too crazy with the number of navigation tabs, so keeping your main navigation limited to your primary pages is a good rule of thumb. What you’re creating is essentially a hierarchical organization of all of your website’s planned pages. If you end up with pages that clearly need their own tab, you can adjust for that, too. That’s another reason that it’s important to plan it out beforehand or you waste a lot of time with your designer trying to figure out how your site should be set up. The final list of planned pages is what you will use to gather the content for each page.

Content

When you are deciding what information goes on which page, the most important piece of the puzzle is clarity. It needs to be very clear to a person who has never been to your website where everything is and how to find the information they need. Things like return policies, shipping costs, contact information, and business hours should be located in multiple obvious places. After all, if your customers or clients can’t find information on your website quickly and easily, they will just go somewhere else. Your content is the most important piece of your website, but don’t worry, because like I said earlier, I’m going to go over this section in a lot more detail next week.

All of these things are just as important for a new business as an established one. An established business just refreshing their website has information on their current site to work with, though it often needs updating. When building a brand new business, you’re going to have to potentially create a lot of verbiage around your mission, your services, your products or services, your pricing, and (gasp!) your bio! This is critical to conveying your business to your potential customers and it is not something that can be done in an afternoon. Make a plan, set goals to finish one page per day or work with a business coach to get your language just right. Your website will thank you.

-CB <3

It’s a familiar scene. Someone needs just “a short bio” from you and so here you are in front of your blank document trying to figure out where to even start writing this thing. You Google “How to Write a Bio” and try to mash together a bunch of different suggestions and emulate the examples you like, but somehow, this process takes hours. “How can that be?” you think. “This is me! I know plenty about myself! Why can’t I think of anything to write?”

I’m going to try to help you out. I have written lots of different bios (long, short, and everything in between) for many different things (websites, recital programs, social media) and I find that the best way to approach this task is to have a system, but not so strict a system that it becomes basically a Mad Lib. Cookie cutter bios are everywhere and not only do they all sound the same, they are boring and don’t hold the reader’s attention. If that’s not the whole point, I don’t know what is.

The Process

My process has 3 main parts: Audience + Purpose= Tone, High Points, and Magical Writing Dust.

Audience + Purpose = Tone

First and foremost, you need to know your audience (who will be reading your bio), your purpose (why they will be reading your bio) and once you have solid answers for these two, those answers can inform your tone (the overall feel of your bio). If you are writing content for the About page on your website, your audience is your potential clients or customers, and your purpose is to give them information about your experience and your personality, for lack of a better word. When clients read your bio, they should get a sense of what it will be like to work with you. 

Your tone can do this as well as the specific pieces of information you share. Working with a person who has a very serious personality is going to be a very different experience than working with someone who has a more laid-back attitude. Using very neutral, professional language projects seriousness, while using more colloquial language projects levity. Neither is better or worse, but attracting clients who have a work style similar to yours can be beneficial to both you and your clients, so it’s important to be true to your own voice. Identifying your audience and clarifying your purpose will help you decide on the tone of your bio.

High Points

Now that you kind of have an idea how you want your bio to sound, you need to get a plan for what you want to say. The two most important components of your bio are:

Relevant Experience – ex. Industry experience for 5 years, previous job responsibilities, training classes you’ve attended or certifications or degrees you’ve earned.
Personal Tidbits – ex. You have lived in the area your whole life, you like dogs, enjoy long walks on the beach.

To add that special, readable quality to your bio, you need one more element:

Something Extra – ex. Your business philosophy, your commitment to supporting a local charity, why or how you got into this field in the first place. This piece is where you can really let your personality shine!

What I usually do is just list at least 3 or 4 things for every High Point. You might not use every one of them, but it’s good to have lots of material to choose from. Once you’ve gotten your High Points organized, then it’s time to for the Magical Writing Dust.

Magical Writing Dust

This is where you actually write the bio! Yay! I like to think of it as sprinkling Magical Writing Dust on all of your information so it becomes more interesting than just a list of facts about you. This is another place that your Tone from Step 1 comes into play. The structure and language can make your writing sound very professional or very casual, or somewhere in the middle. First, you need to decide how you want your bio to lay out. A classic structure is Intro, Experience (in chronological order), and Conclusion. Since you’ve already figured out what pieces of information you want to include, it’s just a matter of choosing what section they go into. For example, the High Points in my bio are organized like this:

Intro:
Twitter bio
Interests

Experience (in chronological order):
Early Design
Website Creation
Tech Start-Up
Current Business

Closing:
Business Philosophy

I could just as easily move the elements around and still have an informative bio, but I wanted to strike a more informal tone, so I opened with my interests rather than the more prevalent, and arguably more professional, style of closing with interests. What can I say? I’m a rebel.

Connecting the Dots

When you’ve got everything in the order you want, add in some connecting language. Before, after, next, and then are all good ways to transition from one sentence to another and help your bio tell a story. From a writing standpoint, a best practice is not to start more than two sentences in a row with the same word, so those connectors can come in pretty handy.

Ex. I worked at one place doing something. I worked at another place doing another thing.
Can become
After becoming interested in the field, I worked at a place doing something. Then, when I had advanced my skills, I moved on to another place doing a different thing.

Another good way to vary your language in this step is to flip the sentences a little.

Ex. I worked at a place doing something
Can become
I worked doing something at a place.

Just remember that the way to keep your reader interested is to give them the information they need wrapped up in an engaging package that is true to your voice.

You Did It!

Once you string all of your sufficiently different sentences together, that’s it! You can basically repeat this process any time you need to write an informative summary of yourself and your experience. It’s handy to have the list of potential bio components around so that if you want to emphasize a certain part of your work history or experience, you can easily add it in or swap other less relevant pieces out. Then you can just sprinkle whatever kind of Magical Writing Dust you need on it at the end with your language and structure to determine the tone. Having two separate bios- a more low key bio, as well as a very professional bio- ready to go, is also a great way to save TONS of time writing and rewriting later on.

And to top it off, it is just your lucky day! I have created a worksheet to help walk you through these steps (get it here). Feel free to it pass along to other bio writers out there. Sharing is caring, my friends. Until next time!

-CB <3

Something I don’t say in my bio is that I have worked in specialty retail for a long time; most of my professional life, in fact. Beginning in high school, I worked for a local gift shop that was basically a Hallmark store on steroids, then I sold fine jewelry for JC Penney and Gordon’s Jewelers, and when I moved to San Marcos, TX after grad school, I worked in my most favorite job to date: the Calphalon Kitchen Outlet.

There were so many things about that job that made it special- the product (super high quality), the parent company (amazing), my coworkers (hard-working and fantastic), and my amazing boss (#ladyboss forever <3), to name a few. It was one of those jobs that mostly didn’t feel like work. It was just a place you went to do something you believed in and cared about. I know it sounds silly to say that I woke up every morning excited to sell cookware to people, but boy, I sure did.

Being a “Good Salesperson”

Even though most of my job experience to that point had been sales related, the Calphalon Kitchen Outlet had something that none of my other jobs did. Their onboarding process for a new employee was extremely thorough, and while they obviously had great product training, the missing piece from my previous jobs was the sales training portion. The Calphalon Kitchen Outlet had very specific, step-by-step, intentional, and incredibly effective sales training. Looking back, that training shaped how I have engaged with customers ever since. It not only gave a framework for selling, but that framework was built on providing the best product for the customer, not just selling the highest priced thing and squeezing as much money out of each interaction as possible.

I’ve been told that I’m a “good salesperson,” but that’s not entirely true. To me, being a “good salesperson” that can “sell anything” isn’t really a good thing. I also don’t think that it is what a business actually needs or wants. Obviously, businesses want employees who can sell, but selling just to make money without concern for your customers isn’t good business. During hiring at Calphalon, I remember passing over candidates who seemed like they were just out to sell the most expensive item they could because that wasn’t what we were about. For my money, it is a much better long-term strategy to find solutions for your customers; even if that means selling the least expensive product you carry or even recommending that they shop at a competitor. When customers can tell that you truly have their best interest in mind, they become repeat customers. 

They can also smell dishonesty a mile away. If you are genuinely confident in your product and have learned enough about your customer to be able to sincerely say, “Yes, this item is going to meet your needs because…”, customers will buy from you. That is why I am a good salesperson: because I listen to customers, learn about their needs, and find them solutions based on those needs.

The Business of Listening

So, friends, I’m sure you can see how this makes sense for Biller Designs’ web and graphic design clients. I faithfully apply these same selling principles in my business now as I always have. When you tell me that you need a website, I want to learn all I can about what your goals are, who your customer is, why you started your business, what is important to you, and everything in between so that when I put together a plan for your website, it’s going to do the things that make sense for your business and do them well. That just seems like good business practice to me, but then again, I cut my teeth in retail and have seen firsthand what happens when pushy salespeople convince customers to buy garbage they don’t need: customers get mad because their needs aren’t met and they return their purchases! Not a good situation when what you purchased was a website that potentially cost thousands of dollars. Usually, you’re stuck with that website until you find someone who is willing to listen to you and work with you to build something that works for you and represents your business.

Maybe Biller Designs is that person for you, and maybe not. Above all, I want customers to find solutions that work best for them. All I’m saying is that I’d love to hear every detail about your business and create something you and I can both be proud of.

-CB