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:

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