Wagner Design Associates Blog

Wagner Design Associates, a local advertising and graphic design firm, received a Silver ADDY in the Ann Arbor Ad Club’s 2010 ADDY Awards competition.

The silver ADDY was awarded to Wagner Design for a self-promotion flash piece. The online holiday card production featured warm holiday colors and morphing illustrations to accompany a warm greeting. The piece was designed to complement a pro bono calendar Wagner Design produced for Safehouse Center, a local community organization that offers refuge and support for women who have suffered domestic violence. Together both pieces reflect the hope and community spirit of Ann Arbor.

Sponsored nationally by the American Advertising Federation and locally by the Ann Arbor Ad Club, the ADDY Awards Competition recognizes and rewards creative excellence in the art of advertising. Beginning at the local level, in 200 markets nationwide, the ADDY’s three-tiered competition is the largest and most representative advertising awards program in the industry.

Wagner Design provides a full range of creative design and advertising in Ann Arbor to organizations in the high technology, retail, health care, financial, and academic sectors. The firm has won recognition and awards for its work in print collateral, direct mail and electronic communications and has been featured in various design publications.

Contact:

Kathy Roeser-Nordling
Wagner Design Associates LLC
T: 734.662.9500
F: 734.662.6590
E: kathy@wagdesign.com

The benefits of setting up an online store are numerous. Some obvious ones include saving your buyers a trip to the store, allowing buyers to use a credit card that will earn points, and giving them access to an easy means of product pre- and re-order. Those advantages are great for your customer, but there are benefits to the seller too. With an online store you’ll attract a much wider audience. It’s a low-cost way of expanding business (much cheaper than a storefront). And, you’ll give yourself a targeted marketing channel that offers immediate results.

Our client, ProTech Dent, recently asked us to set up an online store for their mouth guards. From their website, here’s a little bit about how their unique product was developed:

For years the material was used in Swedish and American operating rooms by our founder, Jan Akervall MD, PhD, an Ear-Nose-Throat surgeon. The material turned out to be much easier to work with than softer conventional mouth guards. The perfect fitting prevented it from moving during anesthesia and the hard, thin surface turned out to be extremely resistant to stress and forces. 500 surgical procedures have been performed without a single dental injury. Comments were heard from fellow surgeons and anesthesiologists how smart and simple it was to handle. This led to the idea of taking it to the sports market. If it protects teeth this well in the operating room, it has to be good for athletes.

We were pleased to be able to accommodate ProTech Dent’s e-Commerce needs. Until recently, online stores were something only huge corporations could afford to do. Today, that’s not the case. New software for creating an online store is now at our agency’s fingertips. It allows the designers to work off of a shopping cart platform and template, which in this case, was customized for ProTech Dent so that branding and identity remained consistent with existing marketing materials. Furthermore, making changes and updates for ProTech Dent’s shopping cart is quick and easy. Secure, customizable, online stores that can grow as the product line expands can now be built quickly and affordably for a company of any size and with any number of products.

For user-friendly, cost-effective web design in Ann Arbor, call Wagner Design Associates today.

I thought it would be interesting to do a series of blog posts that identify and discuss examples of work which highlight individually each of the 7 elements of design: color, line, shape, direction, size, texture, and value.

The first design element for this series is color. The basics of understanding how to classify color into groups like primary, tertiary, compound, etc., aren’t going to be the focus here. I want to talk more about how color behaves in design, in relation to other colors and shapes.

Let’s take the color red for example. If you were to compare the same red spot on different color backgrounds, there would be very different effects. Red would appear more vibrant against a black background and somewhat duller against a white background. In contrast with orange, red would look lifeless; in contrast with blue-green, it would be more brilliant. Also, the red spot would appear larger on black than on other background colors. Sometimes a single color can appear as two different colors if two background colors are used. The effect is that of four colors being used, when it was really only three.

Observing the effects colors have on each other is a stepping-stone for understanding the relativity of color, the relationship of values, saturations, and the warmth or coolness of respective hues.

An example of how our Ann Arbor advertising firm uses color to affect a certain advertising piece is this comedy show poster we did for Planned Parenthood Mid-Michigan. Note how the blues and greens play with one another to create multiple hues and communicate fun. While greens and blues are traditionally calming tones, the design team used them here to enliven the piece and create an atmosphere of energy.

Wagner Design Associates has recently created a life science product development brochure for Ann Arbor SPARK, highlighting the advantages of working with a Contract Research Organization (CRO). Also called Clinical Research Organizations, CROs provide support to the pharmaceutical/biotech industry. They offer clients a wide range of independently contracted pharmaceutical research services to aid in the drug and medical device research & development process.

Services offered by CROs may include product development, formulation and manufacturing, clinical trial management, safety monitoring, toxicology and clinical laboratory services for processing trial samples, data management and medical writing services for preparation of an FDA New Drug Application (NDA), and many other complementary services.

Here in Southeast Michigan, a hub for life science research, life science product development companies are making connections and partnering with CROs. The advantages are many, including the speed to market for a product, which means quicker business success for entrepreneurs. Ann Arbor SPARK, an economic development company can get a successful product development cycle started for companies in the southeastern region of Michigan that will benefit from a partnership with a CRO.

Once established, don’t forget about creating a brand identity. Let Wagner Design Associates help by creating a logo, website, or collateral materials. We’re an award winning graphic and web design company in Ann Arbor with over twenty years experience.

Wagner Design Associates, a graphic design firm in Ann Arbor, is pleased to announce the completion of the Spring 2009 edition of BioMatters, a MichBio publication showcasing Michigan’s Biosciences industry. This is the second volume of the biannual magazine. Wagner has designed both editions and is preparing for work on the Fall 2009 magazine as well. We are happy to be a part of a project that offers outstanding resources, like the Directory and Resource Guide, and which also highlights scientific and economic growth in Michigan. That’s right, I said growth.

As the magazine points out, Michigan is home to more than 540 biosciences enterprises from pharmaceutical and medical device companies to diagnostics, bio-agriculture and nutriceuticals. Michigan is gaining ground with technology-based businesses because of collaborations between local universities, industry, research organizations, government agencies, and other community resources like incubator programs. MichBio’s role is to bring those kinds of collaborations together in order to make bioscience businesses successful. In their words, “We know the players, the market, and what it takes to succeed.  Our members gain access to a valuable network of people representing all facets of the biosciences community.  We are their matchmaker, their guru and their standard bearer.”

For design work, contact:
Kathy Roeser-Nordling
Wagner Design Associates LLC
T: 734.662.9500
F: 734.662.6590
E: kathy@wagdesign.com

For more information on Michbio, contact:
Jayne Berkaw
MichBio
T: 734.527.9147
F: 734.623.8289
E: jayne@michbio.org

Part of successful Web design nowadays is creating a blog to support it. As web designers in Ann Arbor, Wagner Design Associates has designed a variety of blogs for clients including Ann Arbor SPARK, Dataspace and of course, the one you’re currently reading. I, personally, really enjoy reading blogs and there are several I follow. But not everyone is like this. I’d venture to guess that just as many or more folks hit blogs only because they’re searching for specific information via Google. And to those folks I say, you’re missing out. Dan Gillmor, a guest writer over at one of the blogs I follow called Boing Boing, agrees.

He says that when you pick up a New York Times and glance at the front page, you notice not only that there are the obvious news stories, but also some stories that you think, “I didn’t know that I needed to know that until I read it.” So, we lack that “serendipity” by doing specific Internet searches. And with the fading newspaper industry, finding a good blog or two to follow, will help fill that void. You may also find that you connect with certain authors, or certain blog designs, or even begin to have the urge to start one of your own. Explore!