Season 1 - Episode 18

[00:00:09.330] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.840] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.380] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:12.240] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:14.670] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we look at things that affect our businesses over the last seven days. So Taylor and I are both graphic designers and website designers and we have lots of things that we like to talk about that affect the way that we run our businesses, and that includes things like software that we use and things that we learn basically.

[00:00:47.010] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:00:47.490] - Gordon
Is there anything that's happened in the last week that you want to talk about?

[00:00:52.650] - Taylor
I've been trying to kind of play catch up with my project and clients, because I had a massive influx of content and people replying to emails. It seems the emails were turned off for the entire world except for me, and they've just been turned back on for everyone. So everyone has decided to send me their content, reply to emails and approve designs and things like that. So now I've got lots and lots of work to be getting on with. So, yeah, I'm just trying to knuckle down and get it done really.

[00:01:25.050] - Gordon
Right, ok. Get it done and out of the way because you've got more quotes that have gone out, haven't you?

[00:01:30.360] - Taylor
Yeah. And yeah. Just trying to make sure that I get this stuff done that is due at the moment, so then by the time that other stuff gets approved and things, I have time to do it and I'm not kind of drowning in work, I guess.

[00:01:45.030] - Gordon
And you've just taken on two, I think it's two, new clients on a, what's the word?

[00:01:54.890] - Taylor
Retainer.

[00:01:55.210] - Gordon
Retainer, thank you. You've just taken two clients on retainer, haven't you.

[00:01:57.900] - Taylor
Yeah. So that'll be good for kind of passive income and it's kind of like maintenance and things like that.

[00:02:04.080] - Gordon
And it means that you're going to get a certain amount of work every month that you know you're going to get paid for, which is great. And it also helps you to plan your diary.

[00:02:11.970] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:02:12.300] - Gordon
So that you know that you've got to block out a certain amount of time every month for these companies. So that's great news. So really good for you. I've been I've been working on my Digital Asset Management again. It's...

[00:02:28.050] - Taylor
DAM.

[00:02:28.470] - Gordon
DAM yeah. D-A-M Digital Asset Manager. And the the process is something I've been sort of doing on and off for the last three weeks now. It's actually really good for me, because I had a whole heap of assets, graphics mainly, and a lot of those were either out of date or I had multiple copies of the same image in different formats. And so by bringing them all into the DAM, I've managed to get rid of a load of file formats that I don't need. I'm keeping the vector format ones or the Adobe Illustrator ones because they're the highest quality. And it means I can create a PNG whenever I need to of that graphic or, you know, being a vector graphic, I can change the colours or the size or whatever I need to do basically. So that's the best one to keep. And I'm up to 55000 elements in my DAM. And it's really, really good because I can now search for keywords and bring up images almost instantly, which is so much nicer than having it all in just one folder and going in to look and seeing if I can find something when I needed it. So it's taken a long time and hopefully I'm on the last furlong, as it were, the last part of it right now. And I should be finished by the end of this week or the end of today, hopefully. So we will see if that happens.

[00:04:02.880] - Taylor
Probably taken up a lot of storage as well.

[00:04:05.410] - Gordon
It's actually less storage now because I'm getting rid of some of the content. So yeah, I had a big chunk of space that it was taking up.

[00:04:14.520] - Taylor
Do you know how much?

[00:04:16.140] - Gordon
I don't. I think it's about, just trying to do some figures in my head, it's probably about 40 gigabytes worth of data.

[00:04:25.830] - Taylor
Less than I thought then.

[00:04:26.910] - Gordon
No, it's, yeah, it's still quite a lot. I mean that's not including any of the videos.

[00:04:33.220] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:04:34.170] - Gordon
That's just the graphics and 40 gigabytes worth of graphics is an immense amount. One of the reasons I am keeping it on my network storage [motion detected at the front door.] Looks like we've got someone coming in the front door. Should've turned that off. So yes, that's been my, that's been my week. Taylor, do you want to talk about something this week?

[00:04:57.960] - Taylor
So this week I want to talk about branding and kind of for colours. So using colours for logos, kind of brand identity, anything to do with colours really. And kind of when you're starting or setting up a company, really thinking about what colours you want to use.

[00:05:18.310] - Gordon
And why.

[00:05:18.970] - Taylor
Yeah, because there's a lot of colours that kind of mean and give a certain emotion or feeling when you look at them or have a kind of context to them. A good example is any company that is kind of green tries to do renewable energy.

[00:05:35.020] - Gordon
Eco friendly.

[00:05:36.010] - Taylor
Eco friendly recycling. They all take a kind of green colour for them.

[00:05:42.430] - Gordon
Yeah.

[00:05:42.670] - Taylor
And that's just because it's been associated with it. And yeah, that's kind of what people kind of understand now. So it's making sure you kind of make, understand and think about what colours you're using and why and also making sure the colours that you work, if you've got more than one colour, they work together, so they're complementary or you have like a triad, so the two colours, either side of your main colour and things like that to make sure they look nice, and they're not kind of a jar when you look at them.

[00:06:14.230] - Gordon
And the other thing with logos is you sometimes need different versions, because if you've got a light coloured background, your logo looks great on that because it's using dark colours. If you've got a dark colour background, well, then maybe your logo is not going to be seen properly, so you're going to need a variation of your logo in a white colour, maybe like a white out.

[00:06:35.900] - Taylor
And another thing is making sure that your logo is versatile. So logos that have kind of lots of detail and they use a coloured background with colours on top of it, will never really work well for either a dark or light background, depending on what type of back, or logo it is. The reason for that is because you can't white out, they call it, it's basically you should be able to put your logo into one colour and you should still be able to read it and understand it. You know, if you did that to a football logo badge and you white it out, you would just be left with a shield pretty much, and you wouldn't know what football club it is or whatever. So that's another thing to make sure that you're able to distinguish the company or brand when it's just a pure white colour.

[00:07:26.200] - Gordon
And another thought for you is, know your target audience. So if you're going to use certain iconology in your logo, then make sure that it's something that is not going to offend your customers because it means something different in their country or their culture. This is,there are many, many stories, go on to YouTube or just search in Google for logo, logo mistakes.

[00:07:57.750] - Taylor
Yeah, I saw one that, there was a church and they had put worship teach and something beginning with R I can't remember, remember or something. And they had it on banners and they had the three letters at the top in big kind of, they were going down vertical. But the top text was horizontal and it was a big mistake, you know.

[00:08:22.450] - Gordon
And it's funny because I saw a photo of a Starbucks lorry a long, long time ago. And it was one of these, van not lorry, it was a van with a slidy door and the logo was printed on the side with "Starbucks." So the logo sort of like a liberty, isn't it?

[00:08:42.530] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:08:42.720] - Gordon
Yeah, liberty. And then you got Starbucks next to it. And someone had taken a photo because the sliding door was open, so it moved the S and because the door goes in and then along, the next few letters were hidden by the wall of the van and the rest was written on the part that wasn't the door. So instead of saying Starbucks, it actually ended up saying 'sucks,' s-u-c-k-s. And it's the sort of thing that, you know, you really need to think about very carefully when you're creating logos.

[00:09:16.570] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:09:17.560] - Gordon
And colour is very important. Colours mean different things. Red is normally sort of a danger colour and a stop colour. That's why we have red for traffic lights and so forth. But yeah, lots of things to think about. Really interesting topic.

[00:09:35.240] - Taylor
Yeah. What about you this week.

[00:09:37.600] - Gordon
So something that, something that has come up over the last seven days is I had a customer talk to me about doing a video and having a voiceover on that video. Now we all know how important videos are, but this customer said that they were not comfortable with doing the voiceover themself. Some people just don't like their voices recorded. They don't like how it sounds; they don't like the way that they come across on video. So I made a suggestion to them, and this is something I discovered probably middle of last year, and the technology is actually getting better and better, and that is "text to speech." Now, what this means is, you basically type in the words that you want to be spoken, and you choose the voice that you would like to speak those words, and you hit a button and it creates an audio file of a computer generated voice reading out those words. Now, they are getting really, really sophisticated. In the old days, I say the old days, several years ago, you had text to speech facilities and it just sounded like a robot.

[00:11:02.870] - Taylor
Siri was text to speech.

[00:11:04.760] - Gordon
Yes, it is, although in slightly different way. But yes, that is actually a recorded voice. There is a lady whose voice was recorded for Siri and they then cut and spliced all the various sounds together to make the words and some of the technologies use that these days and others don't. So the ones that I've had experience of, I can tell you about, so if this is the sort of thing that you're looking for, the first one I've, I got was called "Audio Flow," and you can go and look that up: audioflow.ai. And it's a collection of royalty free music which we'll come to in a minute because that's, that sort of goes along with this, and a text to speech function. Now I believe there's a limit to the number of words that you can actually have recorded into one file at any one time, and I think that's the same for quite a few of the services that are out there. But there's nothing to stop you making another file if your voiceover or your use for this, it doesn't have to be a voiceover, is you know, longer than the number of words you're allowed, you can just create another file. But audioflow.ai I was particularly impressed with. It sounds really, really good. So have a look at that audioflow.ai. They have an annual fee, so if it's the sort of thing that you need, you can pay a fee and use it for a year and then decide if it's something you want to continue and pay for the future years. I bought this on a lifetime deal, which is something that we will talk about on another episode. So I have lifetime access to that tool. Another one that I don't know a great deal about is called "otter.ai." And again, that's a monthly fee. I don't know a great deal about this, but when I was looking into it, I was told about otter.ai, and I went and had a listen and it sounded really good. And it probably sounds even better now, because as we were saying before, the technology is getting better and better, making it sound a lot more human-like, and the ability to change the type of voice is also quite important. I'll come back to that in a second. One of the ones that I've had experience of recently is called "Speechelo." I think that's how you pronounce it. Link is in the notes. This is a one off cost currently. So you pay one fee and you get access to it for the lifetime of the product. There is an upsell which gives you extra voices which you can choose to to do or not, and I think that is a monthly fee. But go and have a look speechelo, the link is in the notes. One thing I did like about this is you could have different languages, so you could have... So for example, an English voice is very different from an American voice, which is very different from an Australian voice. The accents are very different. So that was one of the things that I liked. Also, you've got male and female voices, which again are very different, and allows you to choose which you want for the particular use case you are needing it for. And this one in particular had child voices as well, which I thought was quite nice. Again, a very different tone and a very different style of speaking. So that's another one I was looking at. Now, I did mention royalty free music. If you are doing lots of videos, royalty free music is a must because what it will do is it will allow you to put music onto your videos that are not going to get penalised by any of the social medias.

[00:15:11.880] - Taylor
Copyrighted.

[00:15:12.760] - Gordon
Exactly, the copyright flag will not go up because it's a royalty free track that you've effectively paid a licence to allow you to use.

[00:15:24.280] - Taylor
You can you can't get licences for popular music.

[00:15:28.180] - Gordon
You can, and some of them are very expensive.

[00:15:29.950] - Taylor
Yeah, they're very expensive.

[00:15:30.850] - Gordon
I mean, extremely expensive. It's, in my opinion, it's better to have music that is not so much recognisable as to take away from the content of your video.

[00:15:44.190] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:15:44.680] - Gordon
You want people to concentrate on the message and by having a particular piece of music that people know, it's sometimes, not always, but sometimes will detract from the actual video message. So two places that I use a lot for my royalty free music is "audiio.com" and that spelt a-u-d-i-i-o.com. And again, that's a lifetime or an annual fee. They do, they're doing both at the moment. These lifetime deals come and go. So if it's the sort of thing that you think is going to be of use to you, the lifetime deal is a great deal, great value. You can just go, oh, pardon me. You can just go in any time you like, find the track that you like. And there's a ton of tracks to choose from. I mean, thousands. You can search by mood or type of music or whether it's fast or slow, that sort of thing, whether it's got lyrics or if it's instrumental, that's another option. And then download that track to use on your videos. And this is great for social media, for Instagram, that sort of thing. And if you ever do get flagged, all you have to do is you have to not claim you have to, you have to basically say, "yes, I have a licence for this" and just say I purchased a licence from and then the place that you got it from. And normally that will unflag your content and you'll be fine from then on. The last place that I use a lot is "digitaljuice.com." Now, this is not just royalty free music. This is a whole host of things. It gives you not only music but it's sound effects.

[00:17:38.200] - Taylor
Yep.

[00:17:38.200] - Gordon
It gives you animated backgrounds for your videos. It gives you graphics and vector art. There's transitions to go from one scene to another. There's titling so you can have lower thirds. The list goes on. It's got a phenomenal amount of content in there. And again, this I bought on a lifetime deal and there is currently a lifetime deal available, and not only that is 50% off at the moment. So I think to get the music part of it, plus a load of other stuff, it's like $150 for the lifetime. And they add content every day. So I highly recommend digitaljuice.com, even if you're just dabbling, even if you're not doing these a lot, but you're going to do some, I highly recommend going to digitaljuice.com and audiio.com. I think there's was $199 dollars lifetime access. So again, it's a reasonable cost but when you consider the length of time that you're having access and the amount of content you're getting.

[00:18:49.210] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:18:49.690] - Gordon
It's a great deal.

[00:18:50.680] - Taylor
There was also "Envato Elements." That's quite a new one that's.

[00:18:53.980] - Gordon
That's something that we've just got. Yeah.

[00:18:55.720] - Taylor
Which is very good. It's similar to Digital Juice where it's got lots of...

[00:18:59.860] - Gordon
Elements.

[00:19:00.580] - Taylor
Elements of kind of video, audio, graphics, things like that. And that's kind of updated and uploaded by individual people. So you can apply and upload your own content basically for Envato to then kind of give people licences to use.

[00:19:17.890] - Gordon
And to monetise and you get paid for the number of downloads you have basically.

[00:19:21.200] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:19:22.060] - Gordon
But from the other side, from our side, it's a great resource to go and search for something because they do everything from WordPress themes through to slides for presentations.

[00:19:34.460] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:19:35.050] - Gordon
What have you used it for?

[00:19:35.800] - Taylor
Graphics, audio, 3D objects, things like that, photography.

[00:19:41.520] - Gordon
Vector images.

[00:19:43.240] - Taylor
Icons. There's a whole host of things on there as well. Similar to Digital...

[00:19:47.260] - Gordon
Video, there is video as well. Yeah. So there's another thing Envato Elements, we'll put a link in the notes for that as well.

[00:19:53.170] - Taylor
That one's monthly, oh no yearly I believe. It's more expensive in the long run but it's always updated and so you're always getting lots out of it and it's easier to cover the costs if you, you know, one or two projects really.

[00:20:09.560] - Gordon
Yeah, if it's the sort of thing that you can do for yourself or for clients, then these sort of things will pay for themselves over and over again. And they're just such a great resource to be able to go to.

[00:20:22.200] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:20:23.390] - Gordon
So I think that's me done. Have you got anything else you want to say?

[00:20:26.780] - Taylor
Think that's it from me as well.

[00:20:28.580] - Gordon
OK. One last thing I will say is that in the news recently is the court case that's going on between EPIC and Apple and Google. So it's EPIC against Apple and Google effectively.

[00:20:47.010] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:20:47.390] - Gordon
And the only reason I mention that, because EPIC are a games, software house. But the only reason I mention that is because it's quite an important case, depending on the outcome, for app stores. So in a in a in a few sentences, basically EPIC have taken Apple and Google to court to say that they don't believe that the 30% that they are taking for app purchases and in app purchases on the relative app stores that's Play Store and the Apple App Store, they don't feel that that is justified. They think it should be less. And they basically want to put their own app store onto the app stores so that they can act as their own app store and have access to all of the...

[00:21:37.460] - Taylor
Wasn't it that they wanted to be able to have like a third party app store that you could download from the internet rather than having to go through the app store?

[00:21:44.840] - Gordon
That is part of it, but they also want access to all of the existing customers. The reason people use the App Store and Play Store, Google Play Store is because it's so easy to use and people have got their credit cards already attached to it, and the content is easy to download, it's in one place. And EPIC basically want in on that without paying anything towards it. And so the only reason I mention that now is because it may affect app downloads and pricing in the future. It's really at the early stages, but it's something to be aware of because, you know, the usage of apps on devices is just going to go up for people like us.

[00:22:30.920] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:22:31.850] - Gordon
You already use your tablet with your pen to do design work and, you know, annotations. And we both use Evernote and, you know, these sort of things can and will be affected. So, you know, keep an eye, keep an eye out into the news to see how that develops. That's it. That's all I have to say.

[00:22:52.520] - Taylor
Yeah, that's everything.

[00:22:53.670] - Gordon
So as we always say, we can be found on YouTube, Facebook and our own website. So YouTube and Facebook, we go live at 1pm on Friday every day. So if you're joining us live, welcome and thank you very much for joining us live. And if you're watching a recording, then to make sure you don't miss out on anything, you can come and join us live on Facebook and YouTube. If you're on YouTube then click the 'subscribe' button and the little bell so that you get notified when we go live, and on Facebook you can click the 'like' button and it will tell you when we go live.

[00:23:33.080] - Taylor
And we also have our website: thisweekwith.co.uk. This is our website which has information about who we are, all links to our social medias, links to the YouTube and Facebook, and also has all of our past episodes on there.

[00:23:50.600] - Gordon
So thank you for joining us. If you have any comments on anything we've said, please leave them down below. And we look forward to talking with you next week on "This Week With," my name's Gordon, I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:24:05.030] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:24:07.930] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:24:08.350] - Taylor
Bye