By AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION NEWS When Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Stefon Diggs laces up for Sunday’s game against the Atlanta Falcons, he’ll be paying tribute to his dad, who died from heart disease when Diggs was 14. Aron Diggs never saw his son play high school football, but he nurtured […]
The post Minnesota Vikings star receiver Stefon Diggs honors father, grandmother with custom cleats appeared first on News on Heart.org.
By AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION NEWS While traffic-related air pollution is common worldwide and is the source of many health problems, little is known about its impact on vascular health, particularly among people with cardiovascular disease. Now, a new study finds that exposure to traffic-related pollution is associated with peripheral artery […]
The post Living near busy roads may be bad for heart patients’ health appeared first on News on Heart.org.
BRANDS ARE NOT JUST WHAT THEY SAY THEY ARE. BRANDS ARE WHAT CONSUMERS SAY THEY ARE. - ARI JACOBY, CEO SOLVE MEDIA
I’ve used that quote before – twice actually – and I’ll probably use it again because its relevancy is never diminished.
It’s seldom fair, but the fact is that perception matters more than reality.
It’s within that context that we wanted to take a day to gauge your perception of the golf equipment brands we cover every day. Leaving little room for nuance, I’m calling it the One Word Survey.
Some of the words are unquestionably positive; language that golf companies want consumers to associate with their brands. Others words are unquestionably negative; language golf brands prefer you associate with their competitors.
The thing is, we’re not interested in how brands position themselves, we want to know what you think about the leading brands in the golf equipment market today.
Give us just a small amount of demographic information, then, for each word presented, choose the brand you most associate with that word. We'll share the results in a few weeks.
Mobile Users: If the survey doesn't load, please click here.
Most golf instructors have go-to training aids and drills that they use in trying to eliminate poor swing habits and promote better, more repeatable, patterns.
But what makes a great golf training aid?
The training aids that endure are the ones that are easy to use and provide instant feedback, so it should probably be intuitive, and it definitely needs to produce results for the student.
Earlier this year we showcased the Top 5 Golf Training Aids on the market today, as determined by over 4,000 MyGolfSpy readers. This list includes tools that have proven to provide real results. That list featured popular training aids like the Orange Whip, Tour Striker, DST Compressor and the Eyeline Putting Mirror. Those are, without a doubt, among the best golf training aids on the market today because they address swing flaws while providing immediate feedback.
Most of you know about driveway stakes, but have you considered that there are countless other golf training aids out there that were never designed to be used in any golf-related capacity whatsoever? Some of the most reputable instructors we know have a mix of common (and not so common) household items in their teaching arsenal.
What are some of the best DIY training aids?
We asked several of the golf instructors we know to tell us what household items they're using, and how you can leverage them to improve your game. Here is their list.
Intended use: Used primarily for eating liquid or semi-liquid foods
How to use it for Golf: “I keep a spoon in my teaching bag to help golfers gain a sense of a flat or flatter lead wrist at the top of the backswing. ‘A spoonful of compression!’” – Andrew Rice, The Club at Savannah Harbor, Savannah, GA
Intended use: Combat foot odor and perspiration
How to use it for golf: “With the larger faces of modern drivers, there is a lot of room for error. It’s important to understand how your strike point will impact ball flight. For example, a slight toe strike will encourage a draw, whereas a heel strike will encourage a fade. In addition, hitting it lower on the face will impart more spin, while striking it towards the upper half of the face will keep spin down. Spray it on the face of your driver until it is covered. Then divide your driver up into four quadrants with a tee or your finger. Pay close attention to your ball flight in relation to the strike point.” – Andy Patnou, Terravita Golf Club, Scottsdale, AZ
Intended use: A container that is used to hold drinking water
How to use it for golf: “I use an empty plastic water bottle outside of the ball to give a shanker something to avoid hitting on the downswing. The water bottle or water bottles can be arranged on the ground to teach the student on their swing path and in working on a more in to out path.” – Hank Haney, Golf Academy at Westridge, Dallas, TX
Intended use: Used when learning to swim, for floating
How to use it for golf: “We use pool noodles a lot in instruction. We have students stand on them for balance. We also use them over aim sticks to buffer accidental impact, and we use them as hurdles to work on trajectory windows.’” – Martin Chuck, Tour Striker Golf Academy, Phoenix, AZ
Intended use: Measure length up to one yard
How to use it for golf: “A great household item is a metal yardstick. Place a ball in the hole on one end and hit putts. If the ball rolls off one side or the other, it was struck in excess of 1 degree off line. If it stays on the yardstick for the entire 3-feet, it was within 1-degree of perfect. This drill is ideal for ensuring that your putter face is returning square to your line at contact.” – George Connor, Golf Channel Academy at Farmington Woods, Farmington, CT
Intended use: Dry off when wet
How to use it for golf: “An overwhelming majority of the people that I work with slice the golf ball. The most common flaw that I see with slicers is the path is too leftward or ‘over the top.’ I use a towel and place it under the arms of my students to help them get the feeling of having their arms ‘pinned’ to their bodies, instead of lifting their hands too high. It’s hard to raise your hands while trying to keep a towel across your chest at the same time. They should be able to make normal swings without the towel dropping from their arms. In addition, I can also lay the towel flat on the ground about 3 inches behind the golf ball and have a student work on missing the towel to help improve ball first contact, while addressing the low point in their swing.” – T.J. Sullivan, GolfTEC Halsted Row, Chicago, IL
Intended use: Secure objects without tying knots and to absorb shock
How to use it for golf: “One of my favorite household items that I use for instruction is a bungee cord. I take one end of the cord and loop it around the player’s right lower bicep (just above the elbow), then take the other end of the cord and go in front of their stomach over their back left pocket of the pants and hook it into a belt loop. I know that sounds odd, but it really promotes a better turn, keeping the arms in front of the body during both the downswing and backswing. It provides a connected feeling where the arms don’t keep running at the top of the backswing.” – John Kostis, Grayhawk Golf Club, Scottsdale, AZ
Intended use: A cleaning tool
How to use it for golf: “One household item that I use is a broomstick with chipping. I ask the student to hold the broomstick at a normal club length outside their front foot. They then make practice swings keeping the longer part of the broomstick outside of their upper torso. This prevents the flips or their wrists from breaking down too soon or too much through impact.” – Jon Paupore, Director of Instruction at Red Ledges, Heber City, UT
Intended use: Hang your clothing
How to use it for golf: “Put it on the left side of your grip, in line with your club with the hook of the clothes hanger aimed up to the sky. It’s great for clubface awareness and building a flatter left wrist at the top, if needed. It’s helpful for players who lack clubface awareness and leave the face open at the top of the backswing. You can help a student to get their arms and hands moving properly in the swing.” – Derek Deminsky (Golf Better Tucson), Forty Niner Golf Club, Tucson, AZ
Intended use: Cover a floor surface
How to use it for golf: “Being able to flop a ball off tight carpet onto a bed and have it stay is a high-level skill. This drill helps golfers to learn how to work the bounce on their wedges and slide the club under the ball to elevate it quickly with high spin. Students can start with a wiffle ball and then move up to a golf ball.” – Matt Thurmond, Arizona State University Men’s Golf Coach, Tempe, AZ
Intended use: To measure distances or to rule straight lines
How to use it for golf: “Tape a ruler to the loft of a long iron and practice impacting the flat side of a bag with the flat side of the ruler. This is a great drill for those students that need more shaft lean at impact.” – Adam Kolloff, Director of Instruction at Liberty National, Jersey City, NJ
This list just scratches the surface on household items that also serve as golf training aids. The possibilities are endless. There is no correlation between the cost of a training aid and its effectiveness. Some outside the box thinking can save you money and still help you get better.
If there are items out there that can also function as golf training aids, they will be used in that fashion. Again, the key is to find training aids that provide instant feedback and address swing flaws, whether they are intended to be used as golf training aids or not. Have fun with it and get creative.
I’ve learned a lot in my twelve years in business. Practically 90 percent of that time was spent starting and closing one startup or another. I had to fail for 10 straight years to be prepared to scale a six-figure freelance business.
Entrepreneurship looked bleak to me and failure unavoidable. But I didn’t pull the plug on myself. I learned resiliency in business through multiple failures, and I matured quickly. Each failure offered lessons I wouldn’t have been able to learn in any school.
Here’s what I learned along the way.
Creating instead of documenting has killed a lot of businesses that had awesome ideas. I got this term from Gary Vee. He says the “create” approach means working on your project until you’re certain it’s completely polished and looks like the top products in the market, and your strategies and sales tools are all top-notch before you ever think of launching.
This requires solid funding to pull off, it’s a huge risk, and will take a lot of time for most rookie entrepreneurs. The danger here is that perfectionism can derail the entire project before it ever gets off the ground.
I recommend that businesses ”document” instead of focusing on creating. In this instance, to document means simply to make a product that sincerely solves a dire need, and launch it after few iterations so that it reaches the target audience as fast as possible.
This strategy means shipping quickly and making improvements as you grow. You can actually ship an MVP (minimum viable product), perfect it, and settle other issues as they come up. This actually aligns closely with the Lean Planning approach, which allows your business to be more agile and make adjustments as you test your idea in the market.
Two of my startups failed because I was so busy “creating” or perfecting the products. Business perfectionism killed my execution and that slowed my business down. One example of the risk of this sort of perfectionism is when I had an issue with the way the product looked, the delays killed the idea.
Focus the majority of your time on the 80 percent of business components that bring in the most money. I had been ignorantly focusing on the 20 percent of the business that wasn’t directly related to revenue. I thought that focus was critical, but in hindsight, I was effectively just doing things that would kill my business.
First, I was letting my temperaments rule my business. As a part sanguine and part melancholic, I was addicted to perfecting things before I launched. I had to grow myself out this phase and force myself to let go.
Second, I soon found out that clients didn’t care about the packaging the way I had thought they did. Customers simply wanted a working product that solved their problem.
Potential customers want value, and they will go any length to get it. I’ve discovered that many times, nothing is really wrong with our product. The core stumbling block is the lack of execution or not executing fast enough to the right audience. Second-guessing breeds fear, and fear incapacitates you.
My freelance business looked ugly. I didn’t have the best of website themes and my design skills were terrible—I thought these issues would repel clients. I was wrong. I simply needed to ignore the perfection impulse and focus on the business engines that were really important.
When I say business engines, I mean components that keep a machine working. Think of your business as a machine made of diverse components that help it function effectively.
So instead of focusing on the designs and themes (the aesthetic), I should have focused on the sales engines (ways to improve my sales funnels). I should have spent more time on the feedback engines—or tracking what was working and what wasn’t for actual customers. And optimizing my outbound marketing email strategy also would have served my business better.
Now, I’m not suggesting that failing is good. I’m simply saying that each setback has a way of teaching you why some strategy won’t work and why others might. Setbacks have a way of showing you what your lapses are, and what you can do about them.
Than main reasons that four of my startups failed were due to wrong market analysis. At first, I wasn’t your typical research-your-market-very-well kind of guy.
I was naïve like every rookie entrepreneur and kept entering competitive niches that were too tight to make money. I knew how to craft products to look good. I had lots of ideas flowing through my mind about potential niches, but l wasn’t getting much traction because the competition was too fierce. That was a failure poking right back at me. Failures and setbacks made me feel bad. Those bad feelings forced me to sit up.
So, I started cultivating a strategy to systematically check for mistakes and quickly work out solutions, because when it took too long to implement changes or address miscalculations, I ran the risk of it ballooning into a larger failure or issue.
For me, the key to reducing setbacks in my freelance business was to study my business metrics, do a robust market analysis, and close the loopholes as they emerged. The faster I did that, the more high paying clients I secured.
For rookie entrepreneurs, focus on learning how to mend business cracks as quickly as you find them, and you’ll minimize the impact of unexpected challenges.
But for this to work, you need to develop the habit of tracking all your numbers. Know every business metric for your company—start with Google Analytics. This will help you discover issues before they become bigger and more problematic.
This is the most important reason we’re in business—to get customers who will pay for our services. What helped me to succeed in my freelance business was my strategic approach to customer acquisition.
Business must be calculable—and it’s same with customer acquisition.
I started to focus on one central question: How can I position myself to get more customers for my business? The more I asked that question, the more I was forced to do deep research to get answers. Those answers prompted me to take action and set up better funnels.
To succeed, a business must have funnels. How did I build mine?
I simply focused on two core aspects of my business: the client acquisition funnel and the repeat customer acquisition funnel.
The first funnel that I set up was for client acquisition. Clients are humans so that ultimately makes them emotional beings that make buying decisions based on their emotions.
You can easily set this up by simply figuring out where your clients are and how to grab them. My clients are very much active on LinkedIn, so I automated the process of reaching out to potential leads by delegating people on my team to do it systematically, so I didn’t have to personally focus so much on this aspect of my business.
I set up the second outreach funnel to make sure I retained my clients, so I wouldn’t just lose them after one or two jobs.
The first funnel kept clients coming in, the second focused on established clients and kept them ordering.
You need to hold on when things aren’t working out the way you want them to.
I started seeing real income from a business after closing seven startups in eight years. Tenacity is the key to success in the entrepreneurial journey.
To tell the truth, when I started, I wasn’t in the best financial position to run a business. Coupled with the recession in my country, it took a lot of emotional fights and doing odd jobs to keep myself standing. And I had to learn different skills to make money in the long period before I was making money from my main business.
I knew that if I could hold on and keep doing what I was doing, success was inevitable. So hold on. Don’t get depressed if stuff doesn’t work out the way you envisioned at first.
Just don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Keep learning new skills that can benefit your startup, and try to leverage them to get side jobs too.
For me, giving up wasn’t an option. That resolve kept me strong till I finally had everything in place to grow a viable, successful business. If you’re not seeing anything yet, hold on, with resiliency you will hit gold. In the meantime, make sure you have a good handle on your personal strengths and weaknesses, and do everything you can to address them.
Get a mentor. I regret not getting one in my early days. There were many mistakes I could have avoided if I had someone with more experience and perspective to talk through my ideas with. Just don’t give up.
Kc Agu is a startup consultant, a success coach, public speaker, and a prolific writer.
By AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION NEWS Eating nearly one-third a cup of almonds a day — either alone or combined with almost one-quarter cup of dark chocolate and 2 1/3 tablespoons of cocoa a day — may reduce a risk factor for coronary heart disease, according to a new study. The […]
The post Eating almonds and dark chocolate lowers bad cholesterol appeared first on News on Heart.org.
No matter how much you love your pet, it can still be frustrating to come home to a damaged carpet. Find out more about how to keep your furbaby from wreaking havoc at home by checking out the following:
Image Source: Flickr
Play with your pup and give him plenty of outlets to release his energy. While you may twiddle your thumbs when you’re bored, some dogs decide to give digging a try and go to town on your carpet. Releasing your dog’s energy through walks or playtime ends those sudden urges to dig and instead makes him plop his butt down and go to sleep when he’s bored. Source: Pets.TheNest
Dogs often dig, scratch and circle before they lie down as a way to get comfortable. Protect your carpet by providing your dog with a comfy bed, preferably one with raised edges so he can feel like he’s snuggling into a safe den. A pile of blankets on top of carpet also can help reduce the scratching problem and give your pup a more acceptable fabric to work with. Source: Cuteness
You may find that your dog starts scratching and digging at the carpet whenever they hear something outside the home. It could well be their response to something they find threatening or worrying which triggers this kind of reaction. However, dogs often scratch at carpets when their owners leave the house, it’s their way of showing they are not happy at the fact they have been left on their own which is called separation anxiety. To help stop them from doing this, it might be worth working alongside a dog behaviourist who would be able to get to the root of the problem and then gently break the habit to prevent your dog from ruining all your carpets. Source: Pets4Homes
A damaged carpet should not come between you and your pet. It’s really easy to fix. Call us today!
The post 3 Reasons Why Your Dog is Scratching the Carpet appeared first on Curlys Carpet Repair.
This post first appeared on Beautiful Canadian Laser & Skin Care Clinic.
A change of season calls for a change in your skin care routine, especially if your skin is susceptible to breaking out. Get to enjoy your holidays more once you practice the following tips: Keep on moisturizing Regular use of a moisturizer is important, even for those with acne. Remember, nearly all acne treatment products dry the […]
The post Winter Skin Care Tips for Acne Prone Skin appeared first on Beautiful Canadian Laser & Skin Care Clinic.
As reported yesterday by Golf Digest’s Mike Stachura, there’s been an escalation in the legal tussling between PXG and TaylorMade.
You may recall that this all started with PXG claiming that, with the P790 iron, TaylorMade violated several PXG patents. In an unusual step, PXG also filed suit against select retailers for selling the allegedly infringing irons. Claiming that allowing the P790 to remain on the market would do irreparable harm, PXG also sought a preliminary injunction blocking the sale of the P790. That request was denied shortly after that, and then things went mostly quiet until two weeks ago.
The latest salvo has TaylorMade filing a counterclaim in which it argues that although it didn’t violate any PXG patents, several current PXG products violate TaylorMade patents. TaylorMade has asked the court to prevent PXG from selling the allegedly infringing products. For good measure, TaylorMade has also asked the court to declare five of the patents PXG used as the basis for its original complaint invalid.
Sound familiar? All that’s missing is a cursory “I know you are, but what am I?”.
According to Stachura, the offending PXG products include entire 0311 Iron family, as well as the 0811 Driver and 0341 Fairway Wood. Stachura observes, “TaylorMade isn’t interested in stopping the sale of just one product. It’s going after nearly all of PXG’s inventory.”
Classic tit for tat and I expect that same result; TaylorMade gets to sell its 790, PXG will likely keep selling too.
To no small degree, this mirrors the approach Titleist has taken in its current litigation with Costco over the Kirkland Signature Ball. And while this gives the appearance of TaylorMade playing hardball with an industry outsider, sadly this is mostly boilerplate patent litigation stuff.
It goes a little something like this:
You infringed! No, you infringed!
Your patents are invalid! No, your patents are invalid!
It’s not so much a calculating war as it is what the late George Carlin would term a prick-waving dick fight.
Want to win a…
Enter MyGolfSpy’s Giveaway!
While I can’t speak to what either side actually believes to be true regarding the validity and subsequent infringement upon their respective patents, from the outside, the sudden discovery by TaylorMade’s crack team of patent scholars that a collection of two and a half-year-old PXG products infringes on its IP reeks of intellectual dishonesty.
Call it a leverage play meant to put PXG on the defensive. It's possible TaylorMade has a case - I’ve been told nearly every golf product infringes on something else if you look hard enough. The strategy might even work too, but it's hard for me to believe either that TaylorMade previously failed to notice its IP was being borrowed, or that it was previously content to give PXG a free pass to use its intellectual property to rule the premium market and potentially take dollars out of TaylorMade's pocket.
2.5 years on the market and you just now noticed? Really?
A preliminary hearing in the case is set for early next month, and while the outcome is anything but certain, I suspect both sides will eventually agree that they’ve spent enough money and that it’s in both parties’ best interest to walk away.
My prediction, nobody wins but the lawyers.
By AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION NEWS Cyteria Knight spent more than a quarter-century caring for others as a social worker. Then a stroke forced her to become the patient. Knight was visiting her daughter Raquanza Miller in Pineville, North Carolina, on Jan. 17 when she suddenly passed out. Susan Miller, Knight’s […]
The post Longtime North Carolina caregiver becomes patient after stroke appeared first on News on Heart.org.
Editor’s note: We’re launching a new product, and we want to take you along for the ride. So, we’re pulling back the curtain to give an inside look at what really goes on behind the scenes of building and launching something new.
After you’re finished reading this article, make sure to also check out the first and second installments in this series as well.
If you’ve been following some of my other blog posts, you’ll know that we’re in the process of launching a new email product called Outpost. I’ve been documenting the process, talking about how we discovered that there was a need for it, and how Outpost got its name.
Today, I’m going to talk how we developed the logo for Outpost.
Don’t worry, this post isn’t just for designers, and doesn’t require that you run out and buy Photoshop. Instead, I’m going to walk you through a process that can work for anyone, regardless of design experience. It’s the process we used ourselves to find a designer and develop our logo. It worked for us, and it should work for you, too.
As tempting as it might be to run out and start looking at designer portfolios to find a style you like, it’s much more efficient and effective to start with a written description of what you need.
It’s called a “creative brief” and it’s the critical first step in the design process.
A creative brief is a document that you can give to a designer to communicate what you’re looking for in a design. It packages everything that you know about your company (or product) into a meaningful, two to four page document that will help guide them.
Creative briefs should be as short and concise as possible. You want your designer to read it completely rather than skim it—and potentially miss important things.
Fortunately, through our naming process for Outpost and the market research we’d done, most of the information that we needed to write down for our designer was already at hand. If that’s not the case for you, don’t worry. You can easily start here, at the creative brief stage, and create what you need as you go.
Let’s dive in and look at what’s in a creative brief.
Each section of a creative brief is designed to help you think about what you want from your logo and to help guide your designer. Of course, you may decide to add or delete sections—that’s fine. After all, this document just needs to work for you and your designer to get you the results you need. It doesn’t have to be the same for every company.
Throughout this creative brief template, I’m going to refer to “your company,” but you could easily use this template to build a creative brief for a product or service logo, too.
Start with a simple, one or two sentence description of your company. What do you do? Try to make your answer as short and concise as you can.
A great way to think about this question is to imagine yourself at a dinner party and another guest asks you what your company does. How would you describe the company without going into incredible detail?
Here’s what we said about our new product, Outpost:
Outpost is a team email inbox for small and growing businesses. With Outpost, everyone can respond to customer email from the same inbox, without stepping on each other’s toes.
Your value statement is really just an expanded version of the short description that you just completed. Here’s a formula for your value statement:
If you think it’s hard to [insert the problem your company solves], then you should try [your solution] which lets [value—why your customers will pay for your service].
I’ve gone into a lot more detail on how to craft a value statement in a previous post, so instead of repeating that info here, go ahead and check that post out.
Here’s the value statement for Outpost:
If you think it’s hard to manage info@ and sales@ emails with a single email account, and customers sometimes get the wrong response or no response at all, you should try a collaborative team email management tool like Outpost, which lets everyone work in the same inbox without stepping on each other’s toes and makes sure customers get better support with fewer headaches.
List your competition here. You don’t need to include everyone you might be competing with, but at least include your top three competitors.
This is important for designers because they’ll want to see how the logo they design will stand out from the competition. Also, you don’t want to accidentally end up with a logo that looks too much like the competition, so sharing this list will ensure that designers stay away from a particular style.
For Outpost, some of our competitors aren’t direct competitors, but the tools our potential customers are using to solve their problem today.
In Outpost’s case, these are tools like Gmail, Outlook, and other regular email systems.
List a few bullet points that describe your key differentiators from the competition. This is important because it will help your designer better understand how your brand stands apart from others that are out there.
Don’t focus so much on feature differentiation here. Instead, describe how you expect your brand experience to be different. Will customers have a different feeling when they buy from your company? Are you targeting a different audience than the competition?
Here’s how we described Outpost’s differences:
For your company, you might be different than the competition because of price, value, features, or any number of things. Think about how you want to stand out from the pack in this section.
A persona is a fictional character that is your ideal customer. A persona description describes this fictional person in detail: where they’re from, age, gender, hobbies, goals, motivations, and so on.
Companies often have multiple personas that they’re hoping to market to, but for the process of building a creative brief, you’ll want to narrow it down to just a couple of personas. Ideally, you can focus on one core persona that represents your ideal, perfect customer, but it’s O.K. if you need to include two. I wouldn’t include more than three personas, though, as that can just make your target audience too broad. When you’re trying to appeal to everyone, it’s difficult to make your brand appeal to anyone.
I’ve written about creating a persona if you need to create one. For your creative brief, you really just need a quick summary of your persona, so don’t let this step slow you down too much.
Outpost’s main persona is Nicole. She owns a well-established vacation rental management business in Wilmington, North Carolina. There are a lot of additional details about Nicole, but it’s just too much to include in this post.
If your brand was a person, who would they be? What would their key attributes be?
In this section, take a few minutes to describe who your brand is and what they’re like. Your brand could be a friendly professor, or that friend who’s always up for anything. Maybe your brand has a sense of humor and talks like a California surfer.
Our product, Outpost, is like your neighborhood barber. He’s friendly, honest, and isn’t afraid to tell it like it is. He’s not going to try and push a bunch of extra products on you (like those fancy salons do). You either need a haircut or you don’t—that’s all there is to it.
This section of your creative brief helps designers understand the personality that your logo should communicate to your customers. If you need a corporate and serious presentation because you’re a law firm, your designer needs to understand that.
List a few bullets that indicate what your logo should symbolize. Should it be a symbol of movement and growth, or perhaps stability and calm? This is where you help set the mood for your potential customers.
For Outpost, we listed:
If there are things or colors that you absolutely do not want to see in logo concepts, list them out here. If you don’t want to see any “swooshes” or images of a globe, say that here. If a purple logo is a no-go, your designer needs to know that.
We didn’t have much of a “no” list for Outpost, but wanted to make sure the brand wasn’t too tied to handling just email. We might want to branch out to other forms of messaging in the future and want to keep the door open for that.
Try and find five to seven logos that you do like. Add these logos to your creative brief here so that your designer can get a sense of the aesthetic that you’re looking for. General guidance here can be hugely helpful and will send a designer in the right direction.
These example logos ideally don’t come from your competitors, but are simply styles and fonts that you like.
I like looking at designer work on portfolio sites like Dribbble and Behance to find things I like. That’s what I did for Outpost and it worked out well.
If you already have a color palette that you’re working with, be sure to include it here.
We had a few colors that we’d started using in the design of the Outpost app, so I included them in our creative brief.
If you already have your product in hand and can share pictures of it, do that here. If you’re going to put your new logo on your product, you want your designer to know what that product looks like.
The design of your product can also help designers better understand your product and brand personality and design a logo that works for that design.
Here’s a sneak peek of the Outpost design:
If you’re designing a logo for a new product and you already have other products in the market, share your existing company logo and other product logos here. If you aren’t at this stage yet, just skip this section.
We run Bplans, LivePlan, and have our corporate brand, PaloAlto. I shared all of those logos as part of our creative brief.
That’s it! Creative briefs don’t have to take a ton of time to create and they can really help organize your thinking around your entire brand.
Now that you’ve got your creative brief in hand, you’re ready to shop for designers. There are a few options that you can consider here and I’ll give you a quick overview of each option.
Sites like 99designs and Fiverr let you post your creative brief and then have designers compete for your business. You’ll get lots of different design ideas from lots of different designers and you choose the designers and designs that you want to move forward with. Quality can be a mixed bag, but thankfully these sites offer satisfaction guarantees.
You’ll pay anywhere from $5 to $1,500 for these services depending on what add-ons you choose and how many designs you want.
You’ll definitely save money by going with one of these crowdsourcing sites, but you won’t get to work face-to-face with a designer. Quality can also be hit and miss, but you can also get great results if you provide honest feedback to designers on these platforms. If you decide crowdsourcing is the way to go, you can read our review of the best crowdsourced logo design sites here.
Another option is to find a designer that you like and see if they’ll take on your project. Sites like Behance and Dribbble are great starting points to find designers that you like.
This option can be more expensive, but you’ll know exactly who you’re working with and can have Skype meetings and phone calls to make sure your designer knows exactly what you want.
Finally, you could choose to work with a design agency. Agencies can bring a lot of firepower to the table—you’ll get a project manager, potentially multiple designers working on your project, and even market research resources that can be utilized.
If you’ve got the budget to work with an agency (at least $5,000 and often much more), then it’s an option to consider, but there’s still no guarantee that results will be better than working with a crowdsourcing platform or an individual designer.
Make sure to check an agency’s references and get a full review of their recent work before jumping in.
Once you’ve decided on the route you want to go, get out there and get bids from multiple potential providers.
If you’re going to work with an individual or an agency, be sure to find out how many initial design concepts you’re going to get and how many revisions you’ll get during the process. You definitely want to understand the full design process before you sign up with anyone.
If you go the crowdsourcing route, all of this is made pretty clear from the beginning, so you’ll have less to worry about there.
For Outpost, we ended up working with 99designs to get some initial concepts for around $500 and then worked with a local designer to help polish a design that we liked.
That’s it! You’ve got all the tools you need to get your own logo designed. If you have any questions, please hit me up in the comments or on Twitter @noahparsons. Best of luck with your new logo!
By AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION NEWS Time is brain. That’s the mantra of physicians who warn that those with stroke symptoms need immediate medical attention. The sooner a stroke is treated, the greater the possibility of saving brain cells and achieving recovery. Now, about a dozen hospitals nationwide are evaluating and […]
The post Mobile stroke units designed to quickly reach, treat patients appeared first on News on Heart.org.
What, in your mind, was the Golden Age of Golf?
Was it Hogan, Snead, and Nelson bashing it around in the '40s? How about the rise of Arnie’s Army in the late '50s? Or the Arnie-Jack rivalry, followed by Jack’s dominance in the '60s and '70s?
Or was it the All Tiger, All The Time era of the early 2000s?
Mondher Latiri puts the Golden Age of Golf just a few years before the Tiger Slam, in the early to mid-1990s.
“Golf’s greatest players included Faldo, Payne Stewart, Greg Norman, and Tiger,” says Latiri. “Callaway was becoming the world’s biggest golf company, reaching $1 Billion in sales, while Cobra was selling to Puma for over $700 Million. Golfsmith was fast becoming the biggest component distributor on the planet, with over 650 employees.”
Interesting take, but who the heck is Mondher Latiri?
If you’ve never heard of Mondher Latiri, you’re not alone. But the company he runs has nearly as much to do with your game and the equipment you use to play it as Callaway, TaylorMade, PING or Titleist. Latiri, you see, is the founder and CEO of Golfmechanix, the industry’s leading manufacturer of the tools, gauges, instruments and heavy duty machinery OEMs use to design and build your golf clubs.
And Latiri believes that when it comes to equipment advancement, nothing beats the '90s.
“Serious dollars were being spent on R&D to decipher shaft performance,” he says. “There were new casting technologies that made oversized titanium drivers possible. This is also the period that coincided with the biggest level of participation of golfers in the US, Europe, and Japan.”
Mondher’s resume is long and impressive, and his fingerprints can be found not only at OEM’s and at casting houses but also at your local clubmaker and fitter and on the workbenches of those of us who like to do-it-ourselves. Latiri has a fascinating back-story and a truly unique perspective on the game, its equipment, and its future.
Browsing through products on the Golfmechanix website is a lesson in engineering. You’ll find, in no particular order: lie and loft measuring gauges, digital swing weight scales, analogue frequency analyzers, digital shaft testing rigs, club head mass property scales, club MOI pendulums and MOI speed match systems, modern gripping and grip alignment stations, lie and loft bending equipment, shaft extenders and epoxy curing stations.
Visit a Tour Van or virtually any fitting center, and you’ll see plenty of Golfmechanix equipment. It’s no exaggeration to say that in some way or another, Mondher’s equipment has helped your 9-iron be the club that it is today.
We tend to think golf's tech-heads came out of the womb thinking about MOI, CG and discretionary weighting, but more often than not, fate brings these people to the game. Mondher, whose background is in marine engineering - that's boat building to the likes of you and me - is no different.
“Somebody asked me if I knew anything about golf, specifically about lie and loft,” says Mondher. “I said when you build boats you do a lot of lofting. Lofting is designing the hull on a one-to-one scale on the floor, so I said I knew a lot about loft, what do you want to know? They said it was for golf, and I said let me look into it…"
“It was a little bit of a word game, but that’s how I got into the golf business.”
Mondher started his golf career in 1990 as head of product design and marketing for a small company called Mega Golf. Inspired by the work of both Ralph Maltby and Tom Wishon, and in need of performance analyzing and quality control tools, Mondher started inventing. His first patent filings included a digital swing weight scale and a loft and lie gauge, as well as the first fully functional digital shaft flex profiling machine.
In 1992 Mondher finally met Wishon and the two formed a mutual-admiration society. At the time Wishon was the Chief Technical Officer at Golfsmith, and he convinced Mondher to join his R&D team. His first task was to create a line of affordable tools for clubmakers, ultimately designing over 600 products.
“If you’re passionate about something, that something will find you,” explains Mondher. “You want to understand the why’s and the how’s. You ask yourself a lot of questions, and it often comes down to simple problem-solving.”
Want to win a…
Enter MyGolfSpy’s Giveaway!
As far as Mondher is concerned, nothing could touch the '90s as golf’s Golden Years.
“From 1990 to 2000, the golf industry saw unparalleled and unusual growth,” he says. “Consumers hit the greens in droves.”
If you look at golf not as a game, but as an actual consumer product that includes golf equipment, golf courses, and golf accessories, a case can be made that golf is no different from any other consumer product – technology drives demand. Mondher believes three specific technological advances drove those Golden Years: the shift to metal woods, the advent of the launch monitor, and the introduction of the shaft adapter.
“When metal woods started becoming mainstream, that was the biggest revolution we’ve seen,” says Mondher. “That’s what made golf playable today; otherwise we’d still be hacking away with persimmon woods.”
Launch monitors also changed the game, because for the first time consumers – and in theory marketing departments – could match slogans with numbers. Vague concepts like spin, launch angle and ball speed now became real and tangible.
“Before you used to be able to sell by bullshitting your way into the market,” says Mondher. “Now we have launch monitors, so the truth is on the table.”
“It’s a shift in paradigm because now we have the tools for determining the truth. From a qualitative and quantitative analysis, it’s obvious: I hit this golf ball, that’s my launch angle, that’s my RPM, that’s my distance. It’s measured. Of course there are some inaccuracies, but I’d rather have that truth than have somebody else’s truth making you believe some club is going to make a big change for your game.” - Mondher Latiri
The third key technology is the one that spikes Mondher's blood pressure.
“The shaft adapter destroyed the livelihood of lots of clubmakers,” he says. “They sell this adapter for $30 or $40 and let you swap out your shafts. That’s why the shaft market is so hotly contested now. You can try ten different shafts when before you couldn’t really do that.”
Mondher acknowledges that the shaft adapter has helped shift more power to the consumer, but he adds more choices can often lead to more confusion and endless tinkering in the pursuit of the proverbial unicorn: ideal spin rate, launch angle, smash factor and distance - which launch monitors made it possible to track.
“The consumer is a little bit lost in a forest of shafts,” he says. “Are the golfers really benefitting? Are the companies really benefitting?”
Offer good through 12/1/2017
Golden Years don’t last forever, and Latiri says the long, slow decline started as far back as 2000.
“China opened up to the world,” he says. “They had a billion workers, and golf is a tremendous consumer of labor. The casting houses moved to China in pursuit of lower and lower labor costs, and those savings could be transferred into marketing to grab market share from somebody else.”
Mondher believes his old stomping grounds Golfsmith was an unintended victim of that market share grab.
“Golfsmith’s success was intimate with club making, and they had very successful lines, like Snake Eyes,” he says. “They could keep three technicians at each story very busy, but since their lines didn’t advertise, and companies like TaylorMade did...he who screams the loudest gets the business.”
Another victim was the club maker, who found himself marginalized by the big boys and their rapid release/discount two-step. That gave consumers choices like they never had before, all at pretty attractive prices.
“Why would someone who’s pressed for time working for corporate America, spend two to three hours with a clubmaker to get custom fit, and then pay the price for it? Especially when all the game is about for him is maybe a corporate outing, and he needs the new clubs to show off to the boss. That’s when everybody started playing golf, wearing all those nice golfy shoes, golfy pants, having a good time with the boss and your co-workers.” – Mohnder Latiri
The 2008 financial crisis popped that particular balloon, and the common narrative says the air has been leaking out of the golf industry ever since. It was in this atmosphere that Mondher started Golfmechanix, a continuation of his work with Golfsmith, to create tools for clubmakers, hobbyists, and OEMs.
Roughly 20% of Golfmechanix’s business is with OEMs, with products to analyze the design and performance of club heads and shafts, as well as measuring tools to make sure products meet R&A and USGA standards. Mondher says he keeps a stable of parts on hand to experiment and provide custom solutions for OEM engineers.
The core business, however, remains with club makers.
“Golfmechanix are tools of the trade,” says Latiri. “I recognize there are guys out there that need to make a living, and that I am a capital expenditure for them. Without my tools, they cannot do their job. They enable the clubmaker to make a living without needing to spend an arm and a leg.”
Gloom and doomers may think otherwise, but Mondher does not believe golf is in crisis mode. The problem, he says, is overproduction combined with the rising cost of retail.
“The only differentiator right now is advertising dollars and how fast you can go to market,” explains Mondher. “You look at all those minor improvements to golf clubs, they’re really just incremental.”
On the retail side, fitting boutiques such as Modern Golf or Club Champion are appealing to the hard-core golfer with money to spend, but the small, independent club maker is being left behind.
“And that concerns me, because golf is a popular game and should be affordable. Clubmaking helps you, with what Golfsmith used to do, and what Golfworks and Dynacraft are still doing. You used to be able to go to clubmaker and buy a set with all the bells and whistles, a nice putter and a bag for $300 or $400. It was really popular, it was inexpensive, and people could enjoy the game without spending a fortune.” –Mondher Latiri
Mondher also sees OEMs trending towards something called Mass Customization; creating small manufacturing cells to build custom clubs while competing directly with retailers and clubmakers for fitting sessions and dollars. And they already have a huge head start with their technology, their advertising budgets, and their online presence.
“All they have to do is refine their production processes where some of the custom clubmaking can be automated,” says Mondher. “Instead of mass producing clubs, they’ll have smaller cells with maybe three people turning out 100 sets a week, just enough to satisfy demand. All of the OEMs have internal programs where they’re systematically getting into clubmaking.”
Even though OEM’s make up 1/5th of his revenue, Mondher remains passionate about providing high-qualityGolfmechanix machinery to the small club maker at what he considers reasonable prices compared to his competitors. And despite the industry trends, he still believes the clubmaker is irreplaceable.
“An independent clubmaker works for himself,” says Mondher. “He has so much at stake, and he won’t bullshit you. He looks beyond that first set he makes for you because he wants you to be a returning customer.”
While Mondher remains optimistic about golf’s future, he is branching out and producing tooling for the tennis and biking industry. As for golf, he believes the industry is just going to have to adapt and that a new era may be dawning.
“The next ten years are going to be just like this year,” he says. “Technology is evolving and we are entering the era of the hardcore golfer. These are people that are taking the game seriously and aren’t just playing casually. The bottom of the market is stagnating.”
The cure for that stagnation, he believes, is the independent clubmaker and getting back to what brought people to the game back in the 90’s – affordability and fun.
“With the world the way it is today, our time is being monopolized, and we’re being marginalized,” says Mondher. “All of us should start playing golf like we did in the early 90’s. It was Democracy; it wasn’t as elite. We need low greens fees, we need affordable golf clubs, cheap golf balls, and we need to drink plenty of beer on the golf course and let people blow their lungs out with cigars!”
There are all kinds of passion in golf. Players are passionate about their equipment, OEMs are passionate about their technology and Mondher Latiri is passionate about all of that, and he has the tools that help everyone in the chain fuel that passion.
“Nobody makes a fortune in golf except the players and maybe big corporate America and their investors,” says Mondher. “For the rest of us, what drives us is our passion."
“That’s what brought people to the game and the people who are still playing after 10 or 15 years, that’s how they got started. Let’s not kill that flame.”
For a limited time, you can save 15% sitewide at GolfMechanix.com. Orders of $300 or more will also receive 50% off shipping charges.
Use code: spyday2017 at checkout.
Offer valid through 12/1/2017
