7 Social Media Trends

In this day and age social media is everywhere. So many of the trends are hard to understand and even harder to do. Here are some do and don't when it comes to these new social media trends.

{ Content Repurposing } Using existing content in a different form

Do

• have a plan to repurpose content on a different platform
• repurpose only relevant content
• consider the platform and the audience

Don't

• copy and paste the exact same content
• repurpose the same content again and again
• post the same content on all your platforms

{ Social Customers Services } Offering customer service on social platforms

Do

• offer the same custimer services online and offline
• hire a trained professional to manage social media profiles
• ensure helpful responses in a short span of time

Don't

• mix advertising and customer service
• neglext negative customer feedback or comments
• forget to incorporate customer feedback about products and services

{ Video Marketing } Incorporating videos to promote your product or services

Do

• create an interesting storyline around your product or services
• try making the story as relatable as possible for your audience
• invite stories on customer experience

Don't

• create cliche storytelling themes that have been used countless times before
• sell your product or services directly in your content
• divert your story to be something different from that of your brand's story

{ Social Advertising } Use of advertisment on social media platforms

Do

• ensure that your ads are location based on target audience better
• make your ads moblie friendly as more than half the traffic comes from moblie devices
• ensure your social advetising strategy is in sync with your overall strategy

Don't

• ignore your audinece demographics
• forget to be informative
• place too many ads together

{ Instagram Marketing } Using Instagram to promote products or services

Do

• provide exciting updates about your prodicts or services
• encourage your cutomers to engage with your brand by using a unquie hashtag
• occasioanlly carry out contests to maintain interests from your followers

Don't

• ignore your customers feedback or comments
• use INstagram only for advertisment
• repost your instagram photos across all other social profiles

{ Pinterest Marketing } Curating and posting pins realted to your product or services

Do

• make use of rich pins for business
• add a personalized description to each pin along with a relevant hashtag
• add a pin it button to all the images on your main website

Don't

• forget to promote your Pinterest account on other social profiles
• forget to engage with other pins that are related to your business
• follow user board just to gain followers in return

Tips for Effectively Working from Home

{1} Define Your Work Space - set aside a space to work where you can completely focus on work.

{2} Stay Organized - it can be hard to separate work life from home life, but with these three tips you can make this easier. Keep an Up-To-Date Calendar, be it digital or paper to keep track of your upcoming tasks and events. Use a To Do List- create a daily, weekly, or hourly to do list to help keep track of the variety of things you need to get done. Everything has a Place- make sure that you keep all your different papers and projects neat and organizes don't complicate your space by putting household items in the mix of your work space

{3} Understand Your Expectations - you have to trust yourself that you can get a job done from home. You must know yourself in order to know how you can work from home

{4} Take Breaks - it's important to remember to take time for yourself to breathe and step away from your work. You still need to eat meals and give your brain some time to pause and relax for a little while.

{5} Define Work Hours - try to set certain hours that you're going to work from home so that you continue to maintain some sort of schedule. Maintaining balance is important so that you don't burn out and end up driving yourself mad

{6} Don’t Isolate Yourself, But Also Set Boundaries - it's important to stay connected with your co-worker, or if you work by yourself, to try and stay connected with the outside world in some way. But remember it's also important to set boundaries with your friends and family. Make sure the people in your life know that you have a job and you have to get work done, even if you're working from home

{7} If Possible, Go Into the Office- sometimes its goes to go in to the office and actually get people to see your face in real life. It will make a big impression and show a lot if you make the little bit of extra effort to be present and show your face to the company

The Final Word - working from home is a privilege, you just want to make sure that you don't let your work life completely consume your home life. Be sure to take breaks, find balance between working and having a healthy personal life 

{ Best Christmas Ads of 2014 }

As soon as December starts I'm on the edge of my seat to see what kind of Christmas ads will be on air. This year has not been a disappointment. To the untrained eye Christmas commercials may look like the easiest thing in the world to create. But getting the right balance of glittery schmaltz and the kind of genuine sentiment that will pull at the heartstrings can be the most difficult task you can embark on in the Christmas season.

With the holiday season in full affect Christmas ads have taken over our TV, laptop and even phone screens. Here are some of the best ads on air right now with a little bit of info on the ad its self.

{1} Mulberry: #WinChristmas

Chose by Mark Goodwin, creative director at M&C Saatchi

The Mulberry film features a unicorn, so obviously it’s brilliant. Everyone loves horny horses, don’t they? Taking the annual present arms race as inspiration, a rather spoilt young woman is given an increasingly amazing array of presents, including the aforesaid unicorn.

Finally, everyone is trumped by Grandma’s gift of a Mulberry bag.

Now it’s all a bit unbelievable. I mean, a unicorn? Obviously that’s going to be loads better than a handbag. But I love the way it tramples the convention that luxury ads must have a po-faced pomposity. Fashion can have wit. Let’s face it, Mulberry sell bags for £2500 so someone is definitely having a laugh there.


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{2} Stainsbury's: Christmas is for Sharing

Chose by Will Barnett, executive creative director at Adjust Your Set

Nine million YouTube views in four days, 174k likes on Facebook and 68k shares. Cynicism: 2k who see it as exploitative and commercial. For me, it’s a moving tale told with sensitivity.

The 1914 story of a Christmas truce where British and German soldiers came together to play football. A gift of chocolate. (Available in store, the proceeds going to the Royal British Legion). The idea ‘Christmas is for sharing’.

Powerful, emotive, beautifully shot cast and crafted, by the talented Ringan Ledwidge. Ultimately benefitting a charity. I noticed a high number of ‘shares’ by serving squaddies. Enough said. Merry Christmas.




{3} Sky Movies: Step into the Adventure

Chose by Clare McDonald, executive creative director at Rosetta Europe

No one brings you Movies like Sky Movies, and nobody gives you huge budget campaigns like Sky. Reaffirming their ultimate position as the place for movies at Christmas: ‘Step into the Adventure’ exploits their prized relationship with Hollywood, brilliantly.

Custom scenes from Frozen through to Spiderman sent my kids into a complete frenzy and cemented their reverence for Sky. “OMG. Sky knows Elsa mummy!!” (Parents will understand the power of Elsa, as did clever Sky).

While most marketers can only dream of budgets this big, at least Sky invests it well to enable a magical Xmas and a future army of smitten fans.





{4} John Lewis: Monty the Penguin

Chose by David Prideaux, executive creative director, Publicis Chemistry

Monty (and the soon to be Mrs Monty) have stolen the nation’s hearts and anyone who sighs “Yet another John Lewis tearjerker” doesn’t realize just what an achievement that is.

Every pixel of the film is precision-crafted. The VAM that surrounds it enriches the experience for all ages, from the clever use of Shazam to the Google Cardboard. And unlike all the brands who’ve jumped on their bandwagon, they’ve resisted making any kind of sell.

In fact, thanks to John Lewis, the real winners this year are the Soho production companies who must now look forward to Christmas with more excitement than the average six-year-old.





These are the top four ads of the season, what are some of your favorite Christmas time commercials or ads. I would love to hear them in the comment section, who knows maybe I'll even feature them in one of my next blog posts.

{ Throwback Thursday - 5 }

This is the fifth installment of my Throwback Thursday. This week is all about logo design and I decided to showcase the first one that I ever created at Villa Maria College.

This design was created my Freshmen year in the Fall 2011. This was the first logo design that I created at Villa, the idea behind the design was simple. We had to pick one letter and one number and combine them in a serious of designs, from there your favorite design would be created into your logo. I combined a lowercase "r" and the number 2. Since my name is Rachel Rising and I've been called "R" squared on occasions it made sense. After about fifty sketches and four designs I final picked the one below.

If I had to make any chances to the design I would make a color chance, and probably create a new company to represent the logo. Since this is one of my first designs, I'm proud of how it turned out and wouldn't change it for the world.

{ Throwback Thursday- 4 }

This is the fourth installment of my Throwback Thursday. This week I decided to showcase something that is not as old as the past designs. This is a recent design within the last year. Also unlike past Throwback Thursday this one will already show the changes that were made.

This design was one for my Advertising Design class, the project was one made for practice. We were each given a random object that we had to create an ad for, I was given rye bread. From the beginning I knew that I wanted to create a creative ad that had a catchy phrase on it. After an hour of brainstorming I came up with "Rye Not ?". From there the ideas grew, before I knew it I was writing rye not out with mustard and going thru the super market like a crazy lady looking for the best loaf of rye bread. After numerous photo shoot and a whole bottle of mustard I had my design. The next step was to create a simple logo, since this was a practice design the layout did not have to be perfect, it just had to give the idea. Making the logo design a little less stressful, since my best friend and roommate is a talented animation student { Jacquie Stone } I asked her to create a quick sketch of me holding a fresh loaf of bread. In less then five minutes, Rachel's Rye Bread was created.

The design that I handed in for the project is the image below.

For the critic the design was given tons of positive feedback, the main problem that people had with it was the rye bread background was hard to see and tell that it was rye bread. The layout needed a lot of work, but for the project it was just what she was looking for.

Once this project was done I had no intention of going back to fix it. It was just a busy project to teach us a simple lesson about advertising. But during the summer break I had some time on my hands and wanted to fix the mistakes. After a few hours I had pretty much created a completely different design that was so much better then the original.

Below is the Rye Bread ad that I use in my portfolio this very day.

I really love this design and how simple it is. If I had a chance to fix it later on, I probably would take it just to see how different it could look after another redesign. But as of right now I'm very happy about the design and how far it came in such a short amount of time.

{ Bonus- Creative Market }

About a week ago I came a across a new website that I would like to add to my Top Ten List of Designer Resources on the Web as a bonus. This website is Creative Market a site dedicated to buying and selling handcrafted, mouse made design content such as vector patterns, icons, photoshop brushes, fonts, and so much more. The best part about Creative Market is that each week they give away Free Goods of the Week, they give three away each week and three more a week if your a Facebook fan. All of the freebies are really helpful and help you grow a great collection of design goodies that can be used later on. As a designer a website like this is great because it helps connect to other designers and helps you get a better idea of whats trending in the design world. You never know maybe someday your design work could be that weeks Free Goods on the Web.

Below I have posted the link to Creative Market, and some photos to help give you a better idea of what Creative Market has to offer. 

{ Creative Market Link }

This Creative Markets homepage from here you have the ability to search for whatever design needs you have. The homepage also features the most popular downloads of that time.  

This is Creative Markets freebies page. Every Monday they post three new free good of the week

 and three free goods for Facebook fans. Since it changes weekly you have around 52 chance

 to grab some great design freebies.

Happy Downloading!!!

{ Behance }

Number two on my Top Ten List for Designer Resources on the Web is Behance. Behance is a social media website that connects artist and designer from all around the world. Behance can best be described as a online portfolio, it allows you to showcase your work and get feedback from other artist, some as far away as China. On Behane it's all about self promotion, companies as big as LinkedIn, AIGA, Adweek, and numerous others have the ability to check out your work and comment on it. Since Behance is owned by Adobe it's a pretty well recognized website. I highly suggest Behance to any designer or artist because its a great site to find out what other people are creating. If you find someones work that you like you can appreciate it and even follow that persons page and get updates from them. This is the perfect website for anyone who wants to connect with like minded people and share their passions.

Below I have shared my Behance information so that you can follow me and possible appreciate my work. I also posted some photos from Behance for those of you who aren't really that familiar with Behance and what it has to offer.

{ Rachel Rising Behance Link }

This is what the homepage looks like when you first log in to Behance. It will show work from the people you follow and the work that is trending on the site.

This is what your portfolio page would look like, it shows your work and how many people have viewed your projects, appreciation your work, and whose following you.

This is what your work pages look like. It gives a more in depth look at what you have to offer. It can go more in depth as what your project is and how many have people liked it. 

Happy Sharing!!!