7 Best Practices to Keep In Mind for Your Next Annual Report

An annual report delivers information back to a brand's supporters at the end of the year, whether they are shareholders in a for-profit company or donors to a non-profit. Shareholders want to see the financial results from the past year, plus the strategic plans for the next year. For non-profits, its an important opportunity to thank their donors and show the social impact of those donations on their supported causes.

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3 Trends at HOW Design Live 2023 From Our Creative Team

It’s been four years since we attended our last HOW Design Live conference, and we were excited to hear it was in Nashville. A quick refresher, this is one of the top design conferences for creatives and Suttle-Straus sent three members of our Creative team on varying days throughout the week. We had the opportunity to see a variety of sessions by amazing speakers, including the first ever “HOW Women Lead” pre-conference. Here are the top three trends our team wants to share:

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A Design Student's Guide to Your First Print Job

You're a new designer, fresh out of school, and you've just been assigned your first print job. Congrats! Now what? Before you rolodex your print production knowledge and excitedly overwhelm yourself with the thought of grommet binding or special UV coatings, revisit some basic considerations for a successful first go.

While this could be as simple as knowing who to contact, to something more specific like proper file setup for print-ready pieces, no detail is too small to overlook. Ease into the process with this broad overview and dig deeper with the resources linked here.

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Design Ideas for Custom Printed Yearbooks

Many high schools today outsource their yearbook printing to national yearbook producers. But some local Wisconsin schools choose instead to give their students the opportunity to fully design and manage the local print production of their yearbooks. This allows creative flexibility in design and a hands-on experience of what being a publication designer is really about.

Here are some design ideas for custom printed yearbooks that we have seen at Suttle-Straus while working with local school districts:

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Design Tips and Tricks from the 2020 Adobe Max Conference

For all of the challenges that 2020 has thrown at us, there have been some bright spots as well. Most recently, the Adobe MAX conference was converted to a digital experience, as so many things have been. But more importantly, the registration fee was waived for all. Adobe saw the need to do its part to spark as much creativity as possible, while showcasing its incredible suite of tools for the creatives of the world of all experience levels.

Here are some of the most interesting new design tips and tricks our team took from the conference:

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Don't Forget About Print: 5 Costly Mistakes in Logo Design

Did you know that common mistakes in logo design can cost your company thousands of dollars for the lifetime of brand logo use? It's true. Many people design logos with a "web first" mentality now. However, every logo has to be printed at some point - what startup tech company CEO would go without business cards? Therefore, logo design can impact the cost of company stationery and other marketing collateral for life. When contemplating designing (or redesigning) your company logo, don't make these errors:

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How to Design Print Materials for Foil Stamping

Using metallics in design and fashion has been trending in 2019 and looks to be continuing into 2020. Like many other company cards this holiday season, we applied a shiny copper foil to a set of eight different thank you cards. Since most designers don't have a lot of experience with foil applications, we thought that we would share our top tips for designing print with foil stamping.

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9 Themes from How Design Live to Inspire Creative Thoughts

Our Creative team was very grateful to have the opportunity to attend the HOW Design Live conference this year in Chicago. For those of you who may not know, this is one of the top design conferences for creatives. We wanted to share some of the common themes we noticed throughout the conference, as well as our overall experience and some recommendations.

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