Written by Tracey Smith of Cinammon Jewellery
Last time I wrote about the importance of using your shop banner to create a whole identity or “brand” for your shop. This week – how to get the banner of your dreams!
If you own a graphics program such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and feel confident enough using it you can create your own Folksy shop banner. But if you’re like me, who fumbled through making my own banner with Paint Shop Pro, kind of liked it then thought no it’s not quite right, you might want to go to someone who knows what they’re doing – a professional graphic designer. A quick search on Folksy for “shop banner design” will bring up several sellers offering their services to create the perfect banner for your shop.
Bonnita Moaby of Folksy shop It’s All About The Graphics graduated this year with 2:1 in BA Graphic Design.
Bonnita offers affordable, quality graphics for online and offline shops and has sold over 150 custom graphics packages . As well as banner design she also offers packages including logos, avatars and stickers. As Bonnita says in her profile “appearance can make a huge difference to your business”.
I asked Bonnita how she works with her customers to bring their ideas to life and produce the banner they want.
“Some customers will supply a brief and can have lots of ides of what they are after, sometimes this can be a bad thing because it’s hard to settle on one path to try first, it’s also fab because I am not having to guess.
Others don’t have any idea at all, if this is the case I ask a set of a questions as well as take a tour around their store, these help me gain an understanding of what they like. It’s quite interesting to ask as the people that say they have no idea what they want end up giving me very precise answers.
Once I have all the information I make a start. At each thought process no matter how simple I will email a draft over to get the opinions of my customers, this is the most important part, it’s no use spending ages designing something you love and they hate, so communication is KEY!
I continue this process until they are 100% happy with the final banner. “
Once her customers are happy with the final design of their banner it is emailed to them ready to be uploaded into their shop and Bonnita always keeps a copy just in case!
I asked a few of Bonnita’s customers how she helped them transform the ideas for their banner into life.
Julia of The Crafty Bride:
“I knew that I wanted to keep my flower logo and the same font but I just wanted it to be more eye catching.
I e-mailed my logo to Bonnita and asked her to work her magic and make it more eye-catching. It was only a couple of days and I got a preview of it, which was centralised with two flowers at either end, one large, one small, and the frame around the edge. I still thought it could be a bit better and suggested maybe an additional flower. Bonnita came back to me with a total of 4 flowers on either side, getting smaller as they spread outwards from my shop name. I loved it. It is exactly what I was after, which was to be more eye-catching but still matching with all my logo’ed items – business cards, garment labels, swing tags and paper carrier bags.
I found Bonnita very easy to work with but then I am fairly easy going myself and was not looking for a total re-design or re-brand job which may require a lot more conversation and debate.”
Ingrid of SteamPunk Storm:
“When I joined Folksy one of the things I was worried about was getting my shop to look at least half way professional. I wanted something a little unusual for my banner. Steampunk isn’t very sparkly and normal and I wanted a logo that matched the idea behind it.
From the moment Bonnita contacted me to ask what ideas I had for my banner the whole process took about 2 hours.
I explained that I wanted something grungy, Leo De Vinci ish with bold graphic writing. I was expecting to have to wait a few days before she came up with a draft, but an hour later she had come up with my new banner. I couldn’t believe that she had somehow got into my head and produced EXACTLY what I had thought of.”
Mirjam of Mirribeads:
“I communicated with Bonnita via email, which I found a bit scary, because how can you figure out what somebody likes when you’re not face to face with them? But Bonnita just kind of got me. After a few rambling emails from me she said she thought a Tim Burtonesque lettering would be the way to go and she added the spider and rose on my request. When she first mailed me the banner I was blown away. She had only gone and rummaged in my head and found exactly what I hadn’t even thought of – the lettering was brill and I loved the piece of text she put at the bottom, ‘Bringing the old and broken back to life’. I know I had put something to that effect in my shop description, but she just distilled it to the right form. We juggled around with the colours a bit and then when I received the final banner it took me a little fiddling to install, my computer was being awkward, but it was so well worth it in the end.”
Bonnita is just one of the sellers on Folksy who offers a custom design banner service. A quick search showed several others including : Aleximo Croissant, H J D Crafts, Ruffle Media ,Hello Monkey and Illustrate Me
2 comments
I buy graphics from Bon and Aleximo and I’ve always been thrilled at the results.
Bonnita does amazing things with graphics that I could only dream of doing. A wonderfully helpful and creative Folkster indeed!
Thank you Bon!
Jacqueline x
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