The newly created homepage for dbirnbaum.com’s therapist website.

Ortner Graphics completed a new website design for Deborah Birnbaum MSSW, LCSW this week. Deborah has started a new Psycho therapy service located in Nyack, New York and needed a website to help market it. Deborah also needed a logo and business cards. Fortunately, Ortner Graphics was able to be a one stop shop for all of her needs.

The first stage of the design process on this project was creating a logo. Ornter Graphics provided six logo designs to choose from. Deborah chose version utilizing a tree as the corporate mark. This was due to the symbolic strength and tranquil nature. Being in the medical field, the site needed to be presented in a clean and simple manner.

In our initial consultation Deborah had requested that the site maintain a clean and simple design. She especially wanted the site to have an overall soothing feeling with an emphasis on a sea green color. Ortner Graphics achieved this by using photographs of woodland settings. The woodland settings had an added advantage of further reflecting and reinforcing the tree logo design. They also helped to compliment the sea green color. On close inspection, the viewer will notice that every page uses a different woodland image.

The tranquil woodland photos were further tied to the therapy concept because they all contain a unifying path. The path suggests the journey of life. To further enhance the photographs’ concept a mysterious light source was added in Photoshop. The goal of this was to make it seem that the pat was leading towards the light. The idea being that therapy will guide you to a better place or help you see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The website’s development was implemented using the WordPress Twenty Twelve theme as its programming framework. This coupled with meticulous styling in HTML and CSS results in a site which is fully responsive.

The ultimate result of the careful planning and design of http://www.dbirnbaum.com is a clean tranquil website. Ortner Graphics sincerely wishes Deborah the best of luck in her new venture. Deborah is a truly kind and caring individual. Certainly don’t hesitate to reach out to her if you reside in Nyack or the Lower Hudson Valley and are struggling with the challenges of modern times.

Thinking of Selling? Real estate postcard designed to attract potential home sellers.

In 2012, I was charged with the task of creating a direct mail postcard to encourage potential home sellers to list their properties. It was a very strange time to work in real estate because things were just beginning to transition from a buyer’s to a seller’s market. This meant that there were a great many buyers in the Hudson Valley looking for great deals, but most homeowners were squeamish about listing their properties because of the perceived depreciation in market value.

A bold message was required to convince home sellers that it was in fact a good time to list their homes. The message was simple, “Thinking of Selling?” on the front with the headline on the back “Now’s The Time.” A brief message explaining the current market conditions with just enough information to entice prospective home sellers that they could potentially get a good price for their home. All it states is, “If you are thinking of selling this is the time. Lots of buyers out there waiting for the right home to come to market. Inventory is low. Curious about the value of your home in today’s market? Call me at 914-424-7160”

The postcard was created using Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. The standard Better Homes and Gardens grass and sky branding background was utilized, but in a unique fashion. In this case I silhouetted the grass, which proved to be very time consuming, so that it could overlay a pocket watch. The pocket watch is the compelling image in this design and it is used to tie the “Now’s the Time” concept between the front and back of the postcard.

The postcard utilized variable data in print production so that the designs could be personalized for the individual real estate agents. This way they are able to include their name, photo and contact information reaching the mail boxes of their sphere of influence. This postcard design proved to be fairly effective in bringing in listing leads.

If you have a direct mail project that you would like to have produced yesterday, you better stop the clock and contact Ortner Graphics immediately.

The simple intuitive interface of Rage Software's Sitemap Automator

Apple MacIntosh are really great computers. The PC guys will tell you over and over again how Windows systems are better. I used to run Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and Quark on a Windows machine, but I finally broke down and bought an iMac about 10 years ago and never looked back. There are some serious drawbacks, though, regarding Macs and the biggest one has always been the lack of software and especially free software. I hadn’t really run into this issue in a while, but I finally did this week when I decided it was time to add a sitemap to OrtnerGraphics.com.  After spending several hours searching the web for a free solution I finally broke down and purchased Rage Software’s Sitemap Automator.

I was initially lead to Sitemap Automator by my webhost. It was the only Mac supported app in a long list of free Windows suggestions. Therefore, Sitemap Automator was obviously the first one that I checked out. However, the $30 price tag really scared me away. I figured I would find a free version just as good so I kept looking. However, I quickly noticed that mostly what I was finding were people lamenting the fact that there were no good free sitemap generators out there. Before ultimately purchasing Sitemap Automator I also tested OmniGraffle Sitemap Generator, iGoomap, and googlesitemap.

It became immediately obvious to me that Sitemap Automator was far superior to these other generators due to its robust filtering capacities. Sitemap Automator gives you the ability to scan a website and Ad, Not Ad, Change Priority, Change Frequency or Set the Last Modified date of specific pages for your sitemap. To do so it uses Actions such as Full URL, File Name or Parent Folder. It also further refines your filter with conditionals such as Is, Is Not, Contains, Does Not Contain, Starts With, Ends With.

For me the “Do Not Ad File Name Contains” filter was just a huge time saver and important when creating a search engine friendly sitemap. None of the other sitemap generators I tested had anything like it that I noticed. It allows you to take all of the automated PHP files (which Google hates) and simplify them quickly and easily to just the pages with important content. This way you can run a quick filter and exclude all of the linked files on your WordPress blog that contain “?tag=” and remove them from your sitemap in seconds. Not having the ability to run a filter like this seems to really defeat the SEO purpose of a sitemap generator in the first place. Using the the Sitemap Automator I was able to scan a website which turned out to have over three thousand automated pages and simplify the sitemap to only 350 pages that contained relevant content. It only took me about five or six minutes to sort through the data that the site map crawled and determine which pages needed to be eliminated.

Once you are done filtering your website’s pages, you can use Sitemap Automater’s handy FTP upload to add the final sitemap.xml file to your server’s root folder and even submit the updated map to Google.

There were a couple of  drawbacks to Sitemap Automator that I noticed. The first was that it seemed to take Sitemap Automator longer to crawl the website and return results than the other generators that I tested. Secondly it crashed both times I used it while running filters, so the software clearly has some bugs and isn’t entirely stable. However, it seemed to have saved the results from its crawl so I just needed to run the filters again. All and all, though, these hickups were far outweighed by Sitemap Automator’s robust filtering system. My only serious lament is that I wasted three hours of time trying to save $30. My other problem is that I still need to turn on a Windows Machine once in a while to test websites.

Thinking of Selling? We'll showcase your home on all of the top national and local real estate websites. This is a variable direct mail post card for use in the real estate industry.

Creating an engaging direct mail post card design can be a challenging task. Especially in the field of real estate where postcard designs are most often simply a photo of a MLS listing along with a brief description of the property on the back. The above design breaks the mold of standard real estate postcard designs.

The Thinking of Selling concept pictured above promotes Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty’s listing syndication through social media and real estate websites such as Facebook, Trulia, Realtor.com and Zillow, to name just a few. A stock photo of a laptop computer was used to drive home the fact that this message is about an information technology service that the company offers. The real estate websites logos were then assembled in Adobe Illustrator and warped to match the laptop photo’s perspective in Adobe Photoshop. The Laptop was also silhouetted in Photoshop so that it could then be imported into Adobe InDesign and placed over Rand Realty’s standard grass/sky background branding image. The text was also written and typeset in InDesign and the logo was placed in the top right corner in accordance with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate’s branding standards.

To ensure a cohesion between the front and back of the postcards the grass/sky image was used again as a background for the text. The body copy on the back further drives home the point to the card’s audience the significance of getting the potential lead’s home on as many websites as possible.

Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty utilizes a direct mail vendor with the ability to create postcards with variable text and photos. This gives their agents the opportunity to include all of their contact information along with headshot on the card. They also could customize the message on the back of the card to suit their needs.  This all ads up to an effective direct mail campaign. The postcard was so successful and popular with the real estate agents that the design was modified and resized to run in several of the Hudson Valley region’s publications as a branding ad.

Branding ad for Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty

Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate has created a large number of videos for the purpose of attracting a web audience to their site. These videos are also a great opportunity for the company to increase brand awareness, so they opted to create some on-air marketing to promote them. Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate then in turn syndicates the videos out to their Franchisee’s. Rand Realty used the opportunity to drive some more web traffic from their print campaign in a few local publications in Westchester and the Hudson Valley with the print ad displayed on the left.

The Power of Color certainly appeals to a graphic designer’s sensibilities. This video explains the basic principles of color theory and how to apply it in interior design. I also clearly used some color theory in the design of the ad. Three instances of Better Homes and Gardens green were placed over a black and white CAD rendered image adhering to the law of thirds. This has resulted in a logo that really stands out and text that is easily readable.

While working on this project I was both under time and budgetary constraints so I used my trusty flatbed scanner for the image of the fanned out Pantone book. This, of course, required some moderate retouching and color correction in Photoshop. The background image, Pantone book, logo and text were all assembled into the final design using Adobe InDesign. Certainly a fun project to work on and the end results make for a great looking ad.

Cover for catalog insert in the Wall Street Journal promoting the new "Distinctive Collection" luxury real estate brand created in Adobe InDesign

Realogy’s Better Homes and Gardens franchise has dropped their Premier Selections luxury brand and replaced it with the Distinctive Collection brand. It was perfect timing for Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty as they entered their spring market campaign. The Rands decided to promote their extensive inventory of luxury homes with a catalog insert in the Wall Street Journal.

Being such a high profile marketing campaign it was incredibly important that the cover use a highly compelling photograph. Conveniently Rand Realty had just struck up a new relationship with Edberg Marketing. Edberg specializes in real estate photography and has the capability of taking elevated photographs.

Simply put, elevated photography raises a camera on an extending mast and tethers the camera to the operating photographer on the ground. The photographer has some limited ability to pivot the camera in order to get the correct angle. However, due to the height the mast often sways in the wind causing some motion blur on many of the exposures.

The Distinctive Collection cover proved to be a very complicated shoot for a variety of reasons. The first reason being that, as always in the world of marketing, we were on tight time frame. The time factor was further compounded by the terribly wet spring that prevailed in 2011. Edberg was forced to try and make the shot in iffy weather at least three times before they finally got some decent light. A second complication was that Edberg was unable to take a vertical photo due to the way that the camera mounts on the elevated mast. Typically in real estate photography this wouldn’t be an issue because horizontal compositions tend to be the preferred format. Unfortunately, Edberg was only able to mount an EOS Rebel on the mast, so a horizontal photo did not hold the required resolution for a high quality cover photo. After a great deal of back and fourth Eric Ortner finally was able to figure out a solution to the problem. With a great deal of reluctance on their part Eric managed to get Edberg to release him the Raw CR2 files. He then opened them in Photoshop at the largest Raw settings effectively faking in resolution. This gave resulted in a large enough pixel dimension to create a hi-res cover photo.

The work didn’t stop there however. Due to the home’s foliage there was a great deal of retouching required. The tree in the front of the house cast unsightly shadows all over the front of the house. The solution, remove the tree and shadows in Photoshop. This required about three hours of retouching. As we all know though, a cover photo with blemishes might as well not be printed. This is especially true when pitching to a luxury market, where everything must be perfect. The following examples are the before and after of the retouched photos.

Original photo with branches and shadows obscuring the front of the home.

Photoshop Retouched cover photo which removes the tree's branch and shadows.

The Distinctive Collection cover proved to be a rather hi-stress project, but in the end it resulted in a great quality high impact presentation piece.

The Explore. Play. Grow. HudsonHeartbeat.com Lifestyle Branding Ad for Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty

It was decided that a major portion of the  marketing campaign for  HudsonHeartbeat.com branding would need to be focused on the Hudson Valley lifestyle. This ad was designed with the Luxury market in Westchester County in mind. After some exhaustive image research and a few other design comps we decided that we should down play screen grabs of the actual site. Instead Rand Realty’s owners wanted to present it as a lifestyle ad. This style actually ties in more with the typical branding ads produced by Realogy‘s Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate franchise branding.

Initially the design used an image of a laptop. However, the new iPad was so much fun that we though it would be more hip to use an iPad instead of a laptop and better reach our luxury audience. The main background photo of the Adirondack chairs, dock, and water is from iStockPhoto. Eric Ortner took a studio photo of an iPad matching it to the perspective of the iStockPhoto shot. He then superimposed a screen grab of the HudsonHeartbeat.com site into the iPad image in Adobe Photoshop. Mr. Ortner then used Photoshop to place the iPad image into the Adirondack Chair Image. Upon purchase of the Hi-Res Adirondack chair it became clear that additional retouching of the iStock Photo image was required. In addition to being distressed, the hi-res photos revealed that the chairs had a great deal of dirt and mildew on them. So Eric Ortner needed to “repaint” the chairs in Photoshop. Some careful selection, masking, feathering and layering eliminated the filth. The page layout’s, photo, logos and text were then all put together in Adobe InDesign.

This branding ad is being used extensively in local publications throughout New York’s Westchester the Hudson Valley. It has also been turned into a postcard and flyer.