Author: Brittany Crockett

Kevin
Welcome to the Content Machine podcast. This week, I’m joined by my friend William Donnell. William is going to be talking to us about his interesting career and how he’s grown and changed his business over the years. William, thanks for joining us today.

William
Yeah. Thanks, Kevin. I guess you’ll have to stay tuned to see if it’s actually interesting or not.

Kevin
That’s true, but I think it will be. Okay. William, you have a really interesting career path that really starts, in my knowledge with you being an Ag major at UT Martin.

William
True story.

Kevin
Why don’t you give us a little bit of background on that?

William
Yeah. I grew up on a farm. If anybody has been to Donald Century Farm, then that’s the farm I grew up on. I was always the geek sheep of the family. But my dad and my brother ran the farm after I graduated college. And then my dad still… My dad has passed away, but my brother still runs the farm, and then my mom also helps there, too. So growing up as being on the farm for generations and stuff, agriculture was just always a big part of my life. I thought that I wanted to do architecture landscaping. So went to UT Martin and got a degree and about that same time, though, my wife and I were dating at the time and started doing music. I do have a degree in agriculture, and I’ve never used it. As soon as we graduated from college, we just continued doing music full-time, which naturally led to doing website design and creative, and then from there. It’s a pretty natural progression. Most people start in a Ag, then they go to music, and then into a tech field. Same old story.

Kevin
The music to website stuff, What was that transition? I know you guys had some success in the music space. You were traveling around, making albums.

William
We made a living.

Kevin
We made a living.

Kevin
Yeah, absolutely. No, seriously. But then how did that transition into websites?

William
Sure. Maybe this is an advertisement for anyone to take electives in college that you’re interested in that are not part of your major. Getting my degree, I had to have a communications class. I could either take speech or I could take visual design, or I think it was desktop publishing. We were using Aldus PageMaker. I’m really dating myself there. You’ve probably never even heard of PageMaker. I’ve not heard of that. This is before Adobe, or maybe at the same time as Adobe, but before Adobe just dominated the landscape. I took a desktop publishing class. I’d always paid way too much attention to advertising and billboards and ads and stuff like that. Just always fascinated by really more that than maybe the fine art side of things. But I was just never a very talented, traditional writing, drawing artist. In that class, though, you could use computers. You could use the Command Z button to undo. If I could play around with something and then undo, let me try to make something different, undo, let me try it again, then I just really got an opportunity. I was like, Hey, this is a tool I can actually use, and I can find a way to be visually creative. My professor, who’s now the dean of the department, says that I am the best Ag student he’s ever had in his program. But I did get a taste of that. Then doing music full-time, the internet started to become a thing. This is around ’97, ’98, maybe something like that. And I realized, hey, we probably need some type of a website. So I didn’t know anyone local that did websites. I knew one person. There was only one person. That’s not true. Beth Rowe, locally, I knew her, and she was doing website stuff. And so I just thought, well, I don’t have any money to pay somebody to do a website. And so I’m just going to get some software and see if I can figure it out on my own. Got some software, used the tutorials that come with the macromedia stuff that was back then, and played around with flash, and played around with Photoshop and a bunch of stuff. And so built a website for our music ministry, and a local business said, Hey, I saw the website you did. That looks really good. Can you make one for my business? And I said, Absolutely, I can. And I knew that I really only had about half the knowledge which I needed to be able to complete that project. But I thought, Well, I didn’t know anything when I started my first project, so I’ll just just figure it out. And so did that project, learned a lot from it, obviously, and continued to do, I think, two more projects with her over the next five or seven or eight years or so. So that’s how I got into it, though.

Kevin
But your business didn’t stop at websites. You did websites mostly for the first how many years?

William
Yeah, websites have almost always I’ve been a part of the portfolio, I guess would be the fancy word, right? But one of the services we provided. But other types of marketing and stuff. So we’ve tried a lot of different things. I remember to begin with, any project that was remotely interesting and would help pay the bills, I would take it. And very early on, I got reconnected with a friend of mine from high school, Shane Aday, who was working for DeVilbiss, I think, locally, and was doing some freelance graphic design stuff. And so he and I got connected, and he was like, Man, I don’t mind doing the work, but I hate talking with customers. I was like, Hey, I could talk to customers! I could do that part! We started collaborating together. Then we did more print stuff because of Shane’s experience with that. That’s how that got started. But yeah, through the years, and I think we’re in our 22nd, 23rd year, I’ve tried lots of different things, and some of them worked, and some of them didn’t work as well because they weren’t profitable or because I didn’t feel like it was not an area that we wanted to continue to dig into, or I didn’t feel like we were really going to be good at this.

Kevin
Well, and I would say, based on just my recollection, because we’ve known each other for probably about 12 years now. Yeah, sounds right. Because I was actually a customer on a very small project at a nonprofit I worked at. And then we ended up working side by side at theCo for several years. So probably about eight years ago, I feel like the change started to accelerate greatly in what you guys were doing. You started moving more into user experience design and research. What is that? What is that? Yeah.

William
Yeah, sure. So first, I’ll explain what it is. So user experience is really thinking about any time a customer interacts with your product or organization. So if you think about if you’re going to go and get a box of Kleenex at Target, then the user experience is not just seeing the box on the shelf, pulling it off, putting in your cart and checking out. That’s not the whole user experience. It’s the whole thing of when you’re pulling to the parking lot, is it easy to find a spot? Is it clear how you get into the building, the signage, the landscaping when you walk inside and you smell the coffee over to the left at the Starbucks? That whole thing from when you first get out of your car, or maybe even before, all the way through when you check out and leave and then later see their ads or any other part. All of that is the experience the user has with your brand and with your organization. So the way I really became exposed… Well, I’ll say that when I first learned that there was a term for this thing was when we first started working with our first startup organization. And so this is really when we got into digital product design from website stuff. But I’ll get into that in a second. But that’s what user experience is.

Kevin
Okay. So how did you make that transition from doing websites to user experience design? And then it seems like over the last eight or so years, that has become an increasingly large part of your business.

William
The short answer is the providence of God. The longer answer is that a great friend of mine since eighth grade is Marcy Harris, who grew up in Lexington, so she’s a local girl. After college, she founded a startup that had one foot in the San Francisco Bay Area and one in the DC area. I was the creative person she knew. She knew that they needed to design a product for pop box, is the name of the product that they were working on. And so got an opportunity to work with her. And then it was really amazing because she got connected with someone who I now consider my friendtor, which is a word I made up, but feel free to use it if you want to. I’m trying to make it a thing. Janice Fraser. Janice is one of the OGs of user experience. The very first user experience design firm is the the one that she was the founding CEO of. So I just happened to, I say happened to, but I think I mentioned the short story, the short version of this. It’s not just happened to, right? But got a chance to be introduced to Janice, and Marcy and all of pop box went through an eight-week boot camp of user experience and really a lean startup methodology for startups. Janice led that workshop, and my eyes became open to all of these things. I was like, Oh, so that’s what that’s called. And that makes so much sense. It was very much this thing of… Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s tons of new stuff that I had never heard of before, but there was a lot of stuff, too, that it was just connecting the dots to things that I just- Or putting a name to something.

Kevin
I’m already doing this, but I didn’t know it was a thing.

William
Right. If somebody said, Oh, that’s called gravity. You’ve experienced gravity all of your life, but you didn’t know. And there’s a principle behind it, and there’s rules, and there’s math behind it. You don’t have to know all the math to understand.

Kevin
To know that you’re going to fall off a chair. That’s right. Yeah.

William
That’s right. Yeah. So getting exposed to all of that was just an amazing milestone in my life, personally, and just changed the trajectory of Sodium Halogen.

Kevin
It’s interesting how people popping into your life can change entire directions of things, right? That started to become a thing. You found more and more of it to or you liked doing it more, you guys really started to pursue that. Why did you chase after that so much?

William
Sure. I think it’s a couple of reasons. One is it’s just way more challenging, way more exciting to create a digital product that, in that case, for that product, there were tens, if not 100,000 people that were using this product. I’d never worked on something that had that scale and reach. Also, because pop box was all about connecting what’s happening in Congress and the laws of Congress with the actual people that are being represented by those Congress people, That was really exciting, too. I feel like we were really good at it. Here’s a thing that is exciting to me. It is maybe, potentially, of more consequence to touch more people than the stuff I’ve worked on before. It is something that I think can be profitable and something that I just really enjoy doing. So working with startups, that was our first introduction of working with startups on digital products. The reaction we got from working on that from the venture capitalist, who are the people who invest in the startups, was very positive, too. There was obviously a need. I think startups were realizing, Hey, figuring Coming out this user experience thing is really important, and there aren’t a whole lot of people at that time that were doing it. So it felt like there was a void in the market, and it was something that we thought was exciting, something we could be good at, and something that would be profitable, too. So you want all parts of that

Kevin
Thank you for joining us for this first half of the episode with William Donnell. Stay tuned. In a couple of weeks, we’ll release part two, where we hear more about William’s business journey.

I wanted to do a little bit of an introduction about me because I know some of you, and some of you are very good friends, some of you I’ve met today. I am not an expert in running a business or growing a business. Many of you have businesses that are larger than mine. What today is, is my observations from doing this for 10 years. Just a few weeks ago, really, my company turned 10 years old. I started it from nothing. When I say nothing, I have a degree in youth ministry, and I didn’t come from another marketing agency. Most marketing agencies that start, you’ll find out that they started another marketing agency or they have a degree in marketing or something, and they worked in the corporate world. I worked at the nonprofit world, and then I jumped out and did this thing, and hey, it turns out I’m all right at it. And so these are just observations that I’ve made. I’ve got a long way to go in improving my business to where I’m super… I mean, I’m excited about my business, but it can be a lot better. For example, I took a huge L last week. One of my customers who I was a little too generous on payment terms and not following up, decided that they’re potentially filing bankruptcy and has wiped my profit off the table for the year. So anybody dealt with that before? Some of you are small business owners. You can imagine that. And so my fourth quarter started on Monday. And because fourth quarter, my goal is to recoup that and get ahead of that. And so I’ve got a bunch of goals for myself because my job in the company is the business development, mostly. So Monday, a week early, started my fourth quarter so that I could have some goals to set for. I’m in the middle of this, like many of you are, and And so we’re going to go through this, and I’m going to try to say everything clearly, but hopefully we’ll have time for questions at the end. I’m a person who likes to establish what are we doing? What are we saying? What’s the framework work that we’re thinking about here. Let’s start with everybody’s favorite thing, terms and definitions. I define working in your business as anything that is direct sales or service. Now, the reason this will make more sense, hopefully you’re here because you want to improve your business or whatever. But I define working in the business as anything direct sales or service. And really, only the largest businesses have people that dedicated only to leadership. Most of us will have someone working on the… Most of us, regardless of who you are, you’ll have some working in the business to do. And it’s important because working in the business is the reason that you make money and have a business. So it’s not that that’s not valuable, but we need to think about how to do it differently because working on the business is, in my definition, something that improves the business by growing capacity or creating long term value. So that’s the definition I’m working with for the rest of this presentation. Something that increases, grows capacity for your business, so it increases your ability to do more things, make more money, service clients better, which creates money in the long run or create long term value for your organization. And working on your business is important, but it’s very rarely urgent, right? Because there’s fires to put out. I put out fires all the time. But here’s the thing. If you’re in leadership at your company, working on the business is your responsibility. There’s nobody else to hand that off to. You can delegate a lot of other things, but ultimately, casting that vision and pushing the business forward is your responsibility as the leader or the owner or whatever you may be. And so we need to think about how to do that. Here’s a couple of examples of what this might mean, working on, working in, just so we can make sure that we’re on the same page as we dive into the rest of this. If you’re launching a new business, getting your marketing together, I would say, is working on the business. You’re at an early stage, you’re trying to figure out who you are and communicate it to the world. Hiring your first employee, I say, is working on the business because you’ve increased your capacity significantly to do more work. Building a strategic plan, working on the business because you are planning for the future, you’re increasing value, hopefully you’re doing it right and you’re doing that. Building an onboarding process for new team members. I think that’s working on the business because you are setting them up to work faster. You’re helping build the culture that you want to have at your company. Fulfilling the latest order that comes in from a priority client in the business. That’s right. You got it. You’re there. You’re working in the business. Hiring an HR person to take care of future hiring, working on the business. Because then they’ve taken care of that responsibility for you so you can do other stuff. Okay, a couple more. Let’s do a little quiz. This is a public participation component. All right. Implementing an AI tool to improve efficiency. That would be on. All right. We’re doing good. All right. Building a personnel handbook. On. This sounds like torture to me. I don’t know about you guys, but this would be something that would be important for your business as you continue to grow. Fixing your biggest client’s problem. In. You guys are crushing this. Rebranding the company. Chad? On. On? Yes. We recently rebranded Foundation Bank. Yeah, definitely on. Speaking to an event to increase your brand reach. I think at this point, I’m working in the business. This is doing the marketing of the business. This is what I’m doing right now. Selling a giant new project. In. Yeah, I think in. It didn’t like that at all. Going to a conference to learn new leadership skills. On. I’ve never seen it do that before. That’s new. Okay, we’ll try to unhook that and start it going again. So, yeah, you guys did great on that quiz. Now, you guys know the urgent versus important grid, right? That famous square that Eisenhower came up with where you’ve got urgent. I have a picture of it, which is helpful. But urgent versus important. There we go. We’re back. Now we’re cooking with gas. Okay. All right. So Urgent versus important. Some of you guys have seen this. Raise your hand if you’ve seen this before. Surely no? Okay. Less than I thought. So you have urgent versus important. Really urgent, important, you do it right now. Urgent, not important, you do it later. Almost everything that we deal with that keeps us from working on the business is that urgent, not important. And really working on the business is important, but it’s very rarely urgent. And so we have a conflict here. So how do we make time to do it? It is a little bit of a radical idea, but almost always working on the business is not urgent. So the mindset I want you to think about today is, how can we change this to be something more important and more urgent for us? How can we think about frameworks to try to make this change happen in our business to help us to get to where we want to be? So the next phase, we’ve got definitions and terms. We all talk about the same thing. Let’s talk about diagnosis. This is a question that you should ask yourself as a business owner or a leader. What’s the most valuable things that you can be doing? There could be a lot of different answers to that. Now, I asked my team this, and if you have a team, I would encourage you to ask your team this question. I asked my team that, and they said things like business development, big picture planning, overall strategy for clients, big picture planning for the company, overall strategy for clients, culture building. So some good things to be thinking of and working on. What is it for you? What’s the most valuable things you can be doing leading your company? You should think about asking your team that question this week, if you have a team. Some of of you have a team, some of you are solopreneurs or whatever, think about that. But if you aren’t a solopreneur, think about that as a team. Now, I printed off nice little workbooks that our team designed for this. If you open to the first page, we have something that I call our Chief Everything Officer Worksheet. As an owner of a business, as a leader of a business, you are likely the Chief Everything Officer. I don’t remember which company branded that, but I thought it was pretty brilliant. This is a tool to help you think about the things that you’re actually doing on a weekly basis, and it’s probably a lot more than you think it is. And you might be propping up more processes in your organization than you really think you are. This is an actual list of things that I did. I gave this talk a few months ago. This was a list of things I did on a Monday preparing for that talk, not preparing for that talk, just while I was preparing for that. So I responded to an incoming lead. I wrote blog content. I led staff meeting. I had a project management call with a client, which was the Jackson chamber because it was a Monday. Interview new semester interns, wrote a proposal, I repaired a broken website, I was sending an invoice, and I set up meetings for projects. Seems like a pretty busy day. It was. But when I look at that, the goal of this exercise is there are things that’s high value for me to be doing, or it’s things I should be delegating. So that the two columns next to that is high value or delegating. I would encourage you to seriously do this for a week. Get home at the end of your day or the first thing in the morning, think back on the day before and be like, all the things that I did as my job, are they high value or should I be delegating them? Some of this list I should be delegating, and some of it I have since then. A lot more that I should be delegating. But this is a diagnosis. You need to get a picture of how much you’re doing so that you can think about other ways to handle that. Because with this, the next question is, when you go back to that first question is, what’s the most valuable things that you can be doing? Is it on this list all the time? Does it make up most of this list? And my guess, unless you’re a lot better than me, and some of you are, is probably not. Because we’re busy putting out fires instead of doing important things. Now, the next question then is, what prevents you from doing the thing that you’re most valuable at? You need to ask yourself that question and ask it seriously. And there’s a couple of reasons that that may be the case. It could be pride. I do this better than anybody else can do it, so I’m not delegating it. Or maybe it’s low quality or unequipped staff. You might have a staffing issue that prevents you from taking the things off your plate that you need to have taken off your plate. Maybe it’s budgetary, right? We have a budget problem all of a sudden that we didn’t have a couple of weeks ago. I guess we did have it a couple of weeks ago. I just hadn’t really come to grips with it. But budgetarily, if I could hire someone else, there’s things that I could do to take stuff off my plate. We’ll talk more about that in a second. One of my pitfalls is that I’m doing too much of the marketing work. We’ve got a great team of designers and stuff, but one of our weak areas is there’s some things that I’m hesitant to hand off to team, and I’m preparing for this talk, and I had a pastor growing up who would be like, Every time I’m pointing a finger at you, I’m pointing three back at me. He was not that great of a pastor, but that was a good illustration to remind yourself that, Hey, I’m talking to you guys about this, but, Hey, I’m not perfect at this either. I’ve got shortcomings. Preparing for this talk made me think about that.

Welcome to the second of two episodes with Katie Howerton, where we talk about type. And so you’re saying that in a good brand kit, so if someone’s listening to this podcast and they’ve got a brand kit from a professional, there should be a font listing in there.

Yes. And they’re ideally multiple. I think in my mind, an ideal set is three fonts. So one being your main title font, which you could use a variation of later, a subtitle font and then a body copy. And you can use those within the same family. I like a little variation. So say you have sans serif as your main title font, try to use a serif or a slap serif to offset things in the body. So yeah, and then in addition to that, you should be getting with your brand kits if they do require downloaded fonts as font files as well, which is an easy step to miss because there’s no one rule for fonts across on the internet. Maybe one day we will have that, but yeah. Yeah.

And now you are somewhat famous for your handwriting, your handwritten script and stuff. So how can using unique type or handwritten script add meaning to a project?

I think something we talked about a lot in college when we were learning about typography is that every font has a voice, which sounds like no child left behind. What I mean is that when you see letters in a certain way, you imagine them sounding a certain way or feeling a certain way. It’s why most of our clients, male clients, if I present any script, they’re like, it feels a little girly. It’s a little overcompensating, but it’s true. There are different… It’s like if you’re doing an old brand and you’re using all very modern type, it’s going to feel disjointed. So often I will use hand lettering when it comes to any brand that is okay with as far as either something that’s playful, something that is very personal, or if you just hit a wall with something. So I think about even our own brand. We have a strong look with using Gotham and using our body copy type. But I like to do quotes in hand lettering so that they have a more illustrative element. They can be one on their own. They don’t have to match everything. And as long as the color palette carries over, that there’s a consistency with elements like that, you can have a little bit more fun. So that’s why I like to use it specifically with quotes, because those are heard.

Yeah, you’re reading it to hear it like someone said it. Yeah, absolutely. All right. And then the last thing to talk about is, sometimes we have a conflict about software in our office, and usually that’s because you are obsessed about InDesign. I feel like InDesign is the… The… The… The…

The black sheep.

The black sheep of the Adobe world that nobody talks about. But you love it.

I do love it.

So I wanted to give you a chance to pitch Adobe and defend your choice to use it all the time.

So, Adobe has many, many products, the three main which are used by designers are Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign. Photoshop for images, Illustrator for logos, is the best way to put it, and then Indesign for print. I ran our Jackson home for five years, and that was what I designed every magazine in. It’s what I’ve designed resumes in. It’s what I’ve designed anything that is going to be printed in because it is made for that. And so if you learn the muscle memory of it, which is like any Adobe product, if you get used to it, you don’t want to-

Yeah, because the key commands don’t transfer between different software.

Exactly. So it’s just very print friendly. But even with that, I’ll sometimes use it for non-print or things that just don’t necessarily need Indesign, per se. There’s a lot more locking features on there. I can envision it better, I think. In Illustrator, it’s a little bit more of the Wild West of you can have things spread out, less organization. I think I’m just mostly an organized person, and I have found a system within Illustrator that benefits that. I can also design two things back to back and pick a favorite, and for me, it’s visually easier. So I would say the Indesign is really helpful for print materials or anything with lots of words. It’s very type-centric. So I would encourage anybody, if you’re creating a business card, if you’re creating print materials, even if you’re laying out for a website, just to play around with the idea of what are the margins? How are we doing this? Indesign is a good place to start.

Well, Katie, thank you so much for joining us today and teaching us a little bit more about type and making a case for InDesign.

Yeah, anytime.

If you have a favorite type project that you’ve seen Katie make, which are all the quotes from this show that you see on social media, please let us know, and I’ll share that with Katie so she can hear nice things about her work. So thank you for listening to the Content Machine podcast. Stay tuned for future episodes about marketing, small business, and leadership in culture. Thank you.

Kevin
Welcome to the Content Machine, I’m Kevin Adelsberger, and this week we are joined by Katie Howerton, who is a graphic designer at Adelsberger Marketing. We want to talk to Katie about some stuff in the graphic design world. Katie, you are known for your hand lettering and your love of all things that is type. Can you give us a rundown of some of the basic terminology that people should know when they’re thinking about type?

Katie
Most people, when they think about type, the first thing they think is font, which is valid. But that can encompass a lot of different things. When you’re talking about fonts, there are three main groups: sans serif, serif, and slap serif. There’s also hand lettering and calligraphy, things like that. But essentially, serif is French for feet. And so sans serif means without feet, serif means with them. So essentially, that’s going to be your difference between a Helvetica and a Times New Roman. That may mean nothing to someone listening, but essentially something that has curved edges, like a Roman look, versus something that is nice and sharp and modern. Slap serif is a good in between in that it has those edges to it, but they’re nice and sharp and not… They’re a more modern look. So essentially, when you’re… That is the three kinds of fonts you can choose from. Obviously, within that, there is bolding your type, italicizing your type. Often, there are different weights, which essentially means how skinny is letter, is it condensed, is it spread out? And often, there’s a lot more choices there than you necessarily need to make. But essentially, when you are picking a font, you are trying to pick something that matches the tone of your business or of specifically what it is doing in that moment. So there’s going to be a difference between what is easy to see and read and matches the voice of a title versus an entire website’s body copy. So, yeah. So those are a few things, as well as font size. That’s something we’re all familiar with. But there are a few rules within that, unspoken rules about this is too small to read, this is too big to fit a word across the line. There are obviously also specifics that you can get into that the designer will get into, but probably not the client, of letter and line spacing. And then your biggest question in the end to ask is, is it legible? Which seems really like a silly question. Legible means you’re able to read it, i. e. your handwriting, Kevin.

Kevin
My handwriting is very good.

Katie
But then there’s also readability, which is technically different in that once something is in a body of text, can you read through it without having to pause and check it. Legibility is ‘can I see what the letters are’, readability is ‘if I see a paragraph of this text, is it easy to read? Or is it clunky or takes longer than it should’.

Kevin
Now I’ve heard in books that you always use serifed fonts because it’s easier to read and then on your phone, you’d see a sanserif font, your text messages.

Katie
I don’t know the science behind that, but it’s true, in that things are easier to read on a screen if they’re sanserif, serif if they’re in print. I don’t know if it’s just muscle memory, honestly. There’s also the difference of light text on dark, how easy that is to read. And that will affect as well how… If you have something really ornate that’s light on dark, it’s going to be a lot on the eyes.

Kevin
That makes a designer’s choice more complicated or something to think through. I’ve heard the phrase font family before. What does that mean and why is that important for a brand?

Katie
So a font family, it sounds silly, but just imagine it like a family. So, primarily what people think of is like, here’s the font, here’s the bold version, here’s the italic version, there’s our family. But many fonts go far beyond that as far as they will have, like I mentioned earlier, a condensed version, a super bold version. They’ll have something called book, which means essentially the way that is easiest to read in body copy. So the great thing about if you have a very large font family with lots of options, is often you can build an entire brand off of one font family. So just like a family, they look different, but they have similarities. So they work together. There are also, I think of two fonts, Mr. Eve’s and Mrs. Eve’s, that are essentially the same fonts, but one is sans serif, one is serif. So they have integrations that make them work well together. So whether you’re picking multiple fonts or you’re working from one font family, you want to make sure that they call back to each other and they work together well.

Kevin
So that would be a phrase we use as pairing fonts together? Okay. All right. And then, if someone has a brand-specific font, how should they handle fonts? Because sometimes a brand-specific font, maybe in what we call the logo mark, you might not be able to replicate that in email or your word document. How should you approach … if your brand has a very specific font, how should you approach selecting a font for your email or your word documents?

Katie
Yeah, so, it’s a real struggle. I will say that in the design world there is a unspoken that a logo should never be just a font. It should always be a variation. Whether that’s incorporating imagery into the letters or tapering things, people shouldn’t be able to pull it up, type it, and say, Is there a logo? That’s what makes it unique. So often what we’ll do is, if you do have access to that font, you can use it for titles and stuff. You don’t want to overuse the main font because then it’s everywhere and your logo doesn’t stand out. But it’s subtitles, things like that. Those are really important to incorporate throughout your website or different areas. We usually work within Adobe fonts because Adobe programs are what we use.

Kevin
And most of the design world has access to.

Katie
Yes. Unfortunately, most clients don’t. They’re not doing their designing. I send them a brand package, they have their fonts, and they realize, oh, we’re using Canva, we’re using Google, we’re using things that don’t have access to these fonts.

Kevin
So this is an interesting point. Not every program that you have or not every computer that you use has access to the same sets of fonts.

Katie
Yeah, and fonts have changed over the years as far as how you use them. It used to be very standard to purchase a font, and that can still be done, but it’s just different, and it’s old school as well. It’s also a very expensive process if you want to own a very prestigious font. I’m trying to get better about using Google fonts on the front-end. Basically trying to say, these fonts are accessible everywhere. You can… The good thing is, too, unlike with adobe, it’s like a subscription system. If you have the access, you get it. With the google font, you can download that at any point and hold on to it.

Kevin
And it’s free.

Katie
Yeah. And it’s not a sketchy… This is a free font website that might give you a virus. So I try to work primarily off of those. If I really am attached to an adobe font, but I know they need something similar to be able to produce things on their own, then I will go into Google Fonts and just mix and match. Often, there are better designers out there who I can google, Hey, what’s a similar font to Helvetica? Because it takes a long time. So I’ll do that. And then also, something that I hadn’t really thought about until recently is a client using their Gmail, like you mentioned. I don’t think about fonts and email a lot, but if you want it to match the brand, that’s a very limited set, as well as a limited set within Microsoft, different things. So really, we’re trying to provide the client, ideally, with a font they can use anywhere, but if not, a really great backup that essentially creates the same effect.

Kevin
And I would say for email or Word processing, it’s really more important for legibility. Or readability, whichever I’m supposed to be saying. Thanks for tuning in to the first of two episodes with Katie Howerton talking about type. Stay tuned to your feed for the future episode where we finish this conversation.

At Adelsberger Marketing, we typically focus on digital marketing for our clients, but we also recognize the value of physical items in marketing. Whether this is something for inside the company or something to give out to the community, both have some finer points to consider. Let’s jump in with internal use first. As a business owner, I love giving my team new swag. Well, why? I think it accomplishes several goals. One, it makes culture practical. One of the great values of swag is that it can allow you to make the components of your workplace culture practical, like making stickers or clothing that emphasizes the core values of your organization. Two, it can make you feel like part of a team, sort of like sports jerseys. Swag can help people feel part of a larger group. Feeling like you belong is an important part of great workplace culture. It can make them feel valued. Giving gifts is a great way to help people feel like they are valued somewhere. And it can be used for recognition. Some companies use special gifts to recognize special accomplishments or longevity in a position. While we get some indirect marketing benefits from equipping our staff with swag, we also see it as a valuable tool for marketing our business as well. Top of mind awareness can be created by swag. It’s hard to measure top of mind awareness, but it certainly plays a role in customers’ purchasing behavior. We’re in Jackson, Tennessee, and there’s actually two safari parks close by. But I bet if I polled our community, 9 out of 10 would only know about one of them. And it’s actually one that is a few minutes further away from us because they invest heavily in top of mind marketing. Swag, when selected and used well, can help you create top of mind awareness in your target market. It’s a physical reminder of your company. We love to give our clients and friends things that make them think about us when they use it, whether that be a sweatshirt or maybe even socks. And it’s late marketing through affiliation. If you do a good job with Swag, People will wear it in the community or they’ll give you a shout out on social media for it. You gain a few marketing points by affiliation with those folks or just as a visible recognition of your brand in the community. Either way, if you’re trying to do internal or external with physical gifts, here’s a few things that you should think about. One, make it unique. Thinking beyond just your logo on things, engage a graphic designer to create something fun for your brand. But also, sometimes unique items will leave more of a mark. Also, make it useful. If the item is useless to the target, it will end up in the trash. Thinking through how people will make it useful will make it a better gift for those people. Or make sure that it’s target market adjacent. So if you have dog people who are customers, maybe create some dog toys. And then quality items. Getting good quality items will increase the likelihood that others will utilize it and therefore increase your ROI on the purchase. A good pen will be used more than a cheap one. Here at Adelsberger Marketing, we’re ready to help you think about building culture with swag. But if you’re really getting into ordering some new gear, I would point you to our friends at IMS Promos here in Jackson. They will hold your hand through the entire process, and we’ve gotten some great sweatshirts and socks from them in the last year. My question to you would be, what’s your favorite piece of corporate swag that you’ve gotten, internal or external? I’d love to hear about it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com, and stay tuned for future episodes of the Content Machine podcast, where we’ll talk more about marketing culture and leadership in the small business environment.