DIY Business Collateral Design with HP Creative Studio
Mike Agerbo: There’s so many aspects to running a business and an important one is getting your image and your message out there, and you do that through advertising and marketing. And to create that image, sometimes it’s difficult for a lot of business owners. You know it’s expensive if you want to go higher your own designers and graphic folks. And if you want to do it yourself, sometimes it's very cumbersome because you probably don’t have those design skills yourself and it takes you literally hours if not days to put something together like a brochure or even business cards. Well we want to have a look today at a website, from HP, it’s the Creative Studio for home and they’ve got it for business as well and it’s full of templates that make it simple for you to create a complete business identity without having to be a design guru.
AJ Vickery: And that’s one thing I ask and fine with, especially small ad businesses or even home based business that. You go out and get business cards printed right away. But there’s so much more to your identity including things like when you send your invoices, making sure that branding is still there, also things like you letterhead and all those types of pieces. It's great if you can find a template because then you can put it all together in one package.
Mike Agerbo: And Creative Studio for home has templates for things like calendars and greeting cards. Well the nice thing there’s a few different options, you can actually create the whole thing through the website itself or you can download the actual template as well when you use them inside of programs like Word. We’re going to go through with the web here. We want to create a whole business kit and I simply select that. And then we got a whole bunch of different template options which is nice.
You can see there’s a whole bunch of different type of style, designs and themes, and we can choose the one that suits us. I'm going to go with this modern business identity kit. That will open up another browser window here and this is where we’ll actually be able to insert all of our information. And this really helps a small business look more established and professional. We’ve done this ahead of time here were just to save sometime today, and you can see input things like your company name, contact information and this is nice. Once you’ve done that, you can see in the bottom. I can create business cards, I can create letterhead as well and even things like shipping labels. It’s taking all that information that we’ve inputted and put in all those different things that we need.
AJ Vickery: It’s funny, it's like little things but it makes a big difference in terms of higher business looks when you’re putting out a professional package.
Mike Agerbo: So we then go down to the second step here where you can import things like logos and pictures, and so we can import a little blink logo here if we wanted to, and just drag and drop on there, and you can see it’s very simple to start doing things like sizing it. At this point here, you can go to preview and print and depending what you’re printing out whether it's a letterhead or business cards, you’ve got some business card paper here with the perforated edges to make it easy to cut out.
AJ Vickery: You can also do cards, stack it and use a paper cutter to make sure you get clean edges.
Mike Agerbo: And once that’s done you know, you’ve got a great looking professional business card and it literally only took you minutes to come up with this. So, you know it saves you a lot of time but you still get that professional look and feel. And you know as far as the brochures and flyer, let’s have a look at some of these examples. These things look pretty -- pretty nice.
AJ Vickery: They really allow a small business owner to see more believable and compete more effectively against some of the larger companies that are more established brands. These things can really make a business standout.
Mike Agerbo: From HP, it’s they’re Creative Studio, it's online and the nice thing most of these templates are free and super east to use. You can find at more at www.HP.CA.
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