Happy Holidays & Thank you to our Clients and Consultants

Thank you to our 2012 partners. Everyone should have received their card already — please appreciate the 20¢ George Washington stamp that had to be added to the holiday stamp. He was roundly regarded as the most merry of all presidents.

Our clients are our passion & our success.
Thank you for being part of our business and our lives.

Thank you to our 2012 clients:

• Age Performance
• Amanda Nelson Photography
• Brach Design Architecture
• Boart Longyear
• Bruges Waffles & Frites
• Chow Truck
• Carrera & Company
• Davies + Allen
• Fluid Heart Yoga
• Knome
• The Mandate Press
• Mazza Middle Eastern Cafe
• Philliou Partners
• Provo River Water Users Association
• Red Queen Book Arts
• SmartMouth Communications
• SOS Employment Group
• Top Agent Guide
• TimeMD
• Utah Symphony | Utah Opera
• Wilkinson Ferrari & Co

Special thanks to our 2012 consultants:

• Michael Carey
• Kira Griffin
• Karen Kaminski
• R. Brian Moncur
• Dave Morgan
• Rob Neal
• Kipp Sorensen
• Beth Turner

We continue our tradition of donating to the Lend a Hand Program on behalf of our clients. This program provides heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer to elderly and disabled Utahans.

Age Performance Holiday Slides

One of the fun things about working with Age Performance is that I get to bascially be their in-house designer. I get to do all the little projects we don’t nomally get to do for clieints. I come from an in-house design background and it’s where I preferred to work before I joined Sawaya Consulting.

Ball Wall at Age Performance — the slides display on the center TV panel.

Age Performance has this big plexiglass wall panels with TVs mounted inside. At the gym we throw medicine balls at them. We swap out the TV slides on occasion and I wanted to share these with everyone:

Geeks and Exercise

What a happy looking piece of equipment. All yellow and sun shiny. Even the first couple swings are fun. And then, BLAMMO!

You are killing yourself. Every day you sit in your fancy Aeron chair in front of your big fancy Apple Cinema Display and you are killing yourself. It starts as an ache in your shoulders. Maybe another one in your lower back. Add another one in your neck (oh, but you just slept on it wrong). And your knees, your knees hurt (but you are getting older after all and you were a dancer for years). And you sit there, and you bang out your projects and you die a crippling death as your bones fuze together and your muscles alternately knot up or became slack and useless. I know because I was there.

And then a guy called us and wanted us to rebuild his website for him. He’s a personal trainer for older adults. We land the job, and I keep trying to understand his methods—because he owns this business with his wife and I want to make sure that a business with a similar structure gets the best of our time and attention. So the rubber hits the road, I pull my photographer along with me and we go do a workout. And we almost die. And my tooth is whistling.

Fast forward, the project is wrapping up and Steve says he wants to try working out at Age Performance. He likes that it’s a private gym (no sweaty grunters, no mirrors, no TVs). And he likes Paul—the owner who would become our trainer.

Fast forward again. It’s been six months and we’ve trained twice a week during that time. Steve looks so different we need new headshots on the web. A woman stopped me in the gym just this morning and told me how great I look. We put on some old clothes for Halloween—they were so loose I had to stuff padding in part of them. These same clothes were too tight a couple years ago.

Why We Exercise

Finding time and engery to exercise is incredibly difficult. As Paul says: as humans we innately want to 1) avoid pain, 2) seek pleasure and 3) conserve energy.

Today I want to pass along part of a blog post from Age Performance. He recently published an article Too Good to Be True listing 60 benefits to exercise. Skate over and read it in his own words, but here are the benefits Steve and I have reaped.

• Increased energy: The right combination of exercise and nutrition creates an hormonal environment conducive to fat loss, increased muscle strength and increased energy. When your body is working at peak efficiency, your energy levels soar! Everyday things become much easier to do.
• Increased Self-Esteem: Gaining control of your body size and weight through fitness is an amazing way to increase self-esteem. You look better and are more confident which empowers you in everything you do. You will find that the self-discipline required and learned through regular exercise spills over into other areas of your life and you will be better able to make other necessary and desirable changes.
• Decreased Risk of a Heart Attack: By exercising regularly and making positive changes in your diet, you lower your cholesterol and blood pressure and greatly diminish the chances of having a heart attack.
• Decreased Risk of Osteoporosis: Regular exercise, especially weight-bearing exercise, reduces the risk of osteoporosis, and can even reverse it buy building bone tissue!
• Increased Strength and Stamina: Every physical thing you do becomes easier which is immensely useful in everyday life.
• Reduced Depression: The production of Endorphins (Feel good hormones) is increased through exercise. Nothing improves mood and suppresses depression better than those endorphins.
• Decreased Stress Levels: The worries and stresses of everyday living (commuting, work demands, conflicts etc.) can stick with you long after the work day is done. Exercise right after work is the perfect natural therapy that can change your mood. You’ll sleep better too!
• And…
• Enhances quality of sleep.
• Improves body shape.
• Tones and firms muscles.
• Provides more muscular definition.
• Enables weight loss and keeps it off.
• Makes you limber.
• Improves endurance.
• Burns extra calories.
• Improves circulation and helps reduce blood pressure.
• Increases lean muscle tissue in the body.
• Improves appetite for healthy foods.
• Enhances coordination and balance.
• Improves posture.
• Eases and possibly eliminates back problems and pain.
• Makes the body use calories more efficiently.
• Lowers resting heart rate.
• Makes body more agile.
• Reduces joint discomfort.
• May add a few years to life.
• Increases your range of motion.
• Enhances immune system.
• Enables the body to utilize energy more efficiently.
• Improves liver functioning.
• Strengthens the heart.
• Improves blood flow.
• Increases maximum cardiac output.

I want to take a minute to thank Paul for becoming a great client, personal trainer and friend. This has been one of the most unique client/consultant relationships we’ve ever had and we’re grateful for it every day (even if it doesn’t seem like it at 7:30 in the morning when we get up to work out).

Why Web Design is like a Good Flower Arrangement

While I was in college I worked at a dried floral and gift shop in Gardner Village. I was fortunate to work with awesome people that wanted to share their knowledge with a young designer. One of the most important lessons in floral design is to make sure you get the three elements accounted for:

Focus • Line • Fill

• Focus is the main flower in the arrangement, these are usually big and colorful.
• Line is grass or sticks or something else that has strong lines to keep the eye moving around the design.
• Fill is the smaller grass or fern or small flowers used to fill in the rest of the design.

Sometimes you build the focus first, tucking other elements around where they will fit, other times you start with fill to build structure then position focus at the end.

This is very similar to web design — where focus is generally large photos, line is the structure of the page and fill is the type.

This work includes the photo “Floral Art – Leo Mendes” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, © marcusrg.
This work includes the photo “24621 Church Door Floral Decorations Mothers’ Day 2011” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, © bsabarnowl.
This work includes the photo “traditional arrangement” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, © ijokhio.

Design Critique: Workshop Flyer

This is part of our Design Critique series.

The Original

This is a flyer our client was using. They hung this up around their facility to invite people to attend this event.

Design Critique

Design Critique Principals that were applied are in bold:

1. Keeping sizes and spacing the same makes your design feel polished.
2. Aligning everything to a grid adds structure and support.
3. The elements of Focus, Line and FIll round out a design.
4. Follow known behavior—your user should not have to be reeducated to complete simple tasks.
5. Put content and structure in a logical hierarchy, adding more weight to the more important items.
6. Line breaks are thought breaks.
7. Choose larger increments for shading and size so people can see the difference easily.
8. Make items in a series either more similar or more different.
9. Limit the number of typefaces you use.
10. Create and stay true to a color story.
11. Use awesome images in your design.
12. Create depth in your design.

New Design

Design Critique Notes

• We cleaned up the margins to use more of the available space and even them out (#1)
• Before the logo was the biggest item, we added more weight to the name of the workshop, added supporting information in a smaller weight and then finally the writeup in an even lighter weight (#5).
• We aded more additional information that we had questions on (what does it cost? do you have to be a member of Age Performance? can I bring my mom?) and broke this up where the thought breaks (#6).
• We found a great image here (#11).
• And then we added a green keyline (#12).