Finamore Design

One of my favorite movie inter­ac­tions regard­ing the topic of morals and ethics is in the movie Elec­tion and goes as follows:

Jim McAl­lis­ter: Dave, I’m just say­ing this as your friend: What you’re doing is really, really wrong… and you’ve gotta stop. The line you’ve crossed is… it’s immoral… and it’s ille­gal.
Dave Novotny: Jim, come on, I don’t need a lec­ture on ethics.
Jim McAl­lis­ter: I’m not talk­ing about ethics, I’m talk­ing about morals.
Dave Novotny: What’s the difference?

What is the dif­fer­ence? That is the atti­tude a lot of design­ers take, whether it is brows­ing stock pho­tos or design annu­als. Tak­ing a photo, copy­ing a design con­cept or lay­out. Is it wrong? Is it ille­gal? Who cares?

Morals define per­sonal char­ac­ter, while ethics stress a social sys­tem in which those morals are applied. While some­thing may be wrong morally, eth­i­cally or both, it does not mean that it is ille­gal (although in most cases it may well be). (more…)

On Sep­tem­ber 27, I attended AIGA New York‘s sold out event titled “Your AD Here: Is Design Reshap­ing Adver­tis­ing (Again)?” at FIT‘s Katie Mur­phy Amphitheater.

The talk was sup­posed to dis­cuss design and it’s impact on adver­tis­ing. Ask­ing the ques­tions of why so many adver­tis­ing agen­cies are start­ing to hire graphic design­ers instead of tra­di­tion­ally trained “adver­tis­ing art direc­tors”, and why so many clients are turn­ing to design agen­cies to cre­ate their adver­tis­ing cam­paigns. (more…)

I make it a habit to show up to every client meet­ing really early. It gives me time to col­lect my thoughts and men­tally refresh myself on the agenda for the upcom­ing meet­ing. Sure, some­times I sit around for a while in the lobby wait­ing for my client, but I always find that they are happy to know that I am there and ready for them. It is never a good idea to keep them waiting.

At one meet­ing recently I showed up about 45 min­utes early for a meet­ing at a cof­fee house, and found my client already there. It was then that he filled me in on “The New Busi­ness Mantra”:

Really Early is Early
Early is On Time
On Time is Late
Late is Unacceptable 

These books are a def­i­nite asset to any busi­ness per­son, cre­ative or not, who wants to score extreme suc­cess. These books are well writ­ten, extremely insight­ful, and fun to look at. I find these two books work well together, while GUT focuses on how to lis­ten to and under­stand your gut instinct, BALLSY gives you the skills you need to act upon these instincts. (more…)

I am con­stantly being asked what RSS is and how to use it. Luck­ily, my friends over getusb.info wrote an easy to under­stand arti­cle all about RSS.

Check it out…

How can I use RSS?

At GetUSB.info we receive emails from time-to-time ask­ing about the RSS feed fea­ture we pro­vide and how it can be used. Today we are tak­ing a few min­utes to cover what an RSS feed is, how you can use it, what you need and how to val­i­date the ones you sub­scribe too.

When you ini­ti­ate a project with a designer you need to do more than say I need a logo and my company’s name is [fill in the blank]. You need to know who you are sell­ing to, what you are sell­ing to them, why you are sell­ing to them, and why they will want to buy it. Typ­i­cally, this infor­ma­tion is pro­vided in a ‘Design Brief’. (more…)

Graphic Design is not like engi­neer­ing, law, med­i­cine or even plumb­ing, where you need to be cer­ti­fied in order to prac­tice the trade. Any­body can walk into a sta­tionery store, buy pre-fabricated busi­ness card paper and print their name and address on them, and call them­selves a graphic designer. Because of this, there are a LOT of design­ers out there. If you are in need of design ser­vices, your job is to qual­ify who the GOOD graphic design­ers and choose the one who is smart, cre­ative, and under­stands your needs. (more…)

It seems that every­time I turn around I run I am bom­barded by infor­ma­tion in 3′s. I started to real­ize it when I was rewrit­ing my company’s mis­sion state­ment. My three main objec­tives as a com­pany it to deliver every project

1. On Time
2. On Bud­get
3. Above Cre­ative Expectation.

Shortly there­after I real­ized that most of my clients want me to meet a triple bot­tom line. That is to say, every project needs to be:

1. Good for Business
2. Good for the Environment
3. Good for the Com­mu­nity (more…)

What impres­sion do you cre­ate when you send e-mails? Every sin­gle cor­re­spon­dence you make directly influ­ences how peo­ple per­ceive you and your com­pany. From the con­tent to the time­li­ness or response , every­thing you do impacts how oth­ers think of you and the com­pany you work for. (more…)

Ready to make that foray into the busi­ness world? Wether you are going to work for some­one else of start up your own ven­ture here are some tips that you should keep in mind. (more…)