Macy’s lamp post banners with wind-slits

What is a Pole Pocket?

A pole pocket is, as you would imagine, a pocket to slide a pole through. These can be on any side of the banner but is most commonly on the top and bottom so that it can be suspended between two horizontal poles.

A typical use for banners with pole pockets would be for lamp post banners or banners used on scaffolding.

Ordering Banners with Pole Pockets

The most common problem with pole pockets arises when ordering. Some people think that the pole pocket is going to be ‘added on’ to the size of the banner. However, this is not the case as the pole pockets needs to be included with the finished size of the banner – this makes things easier from the customer’s point of view if a banner is to bridge two poles.

Measurements on a banner with pole pockets

As you can see by this example the final size of the banner includes the pole pockets. The pole pockets are inclusive of the banner’s size and not an addition to.

One thing that you have to bear in mind is that there may be minor fluctuations in the dimensions of the banner. This is due to the pole pocket being able to ‘squash’ its shape from circle to oval and even flat – this isn’t usually a problem on 99% of banners but if you think this may cause an issue please do speak to us.

The diameter of a pole

The size of a Pole Pocket

We will calculate the size of a pole pocket, required for each banner, all we require from you when ordering is the diameter of the pole going into the pocket. From this measurement we can then calculate the size of the pole pocket required.

How a pole pocket should look

The pole pocket should always have a bit of ‘wiggle’ (the very technical term we like to use), so that the pole can move freely within the pocket. This not only allows for easy fitting, but more importantly it distributes the stresses of the banner more evenly across the pocket and does not focus them on the join, increasing the life span of your banner.

How Pole Pockets Affect Artwork

Because of the un-flat nature of pole pockets it is best not to include any important information on the artwork where a pole pocket will be. Flat colour and imagery are fine, but you should steer clear of using any logos or text that you want readable in this area.

Another element to take into conisderation is the ‘weld line’. This is the transparent line that welds the banner to itself to produce the pocket. Although the weld line is transparent it does have a different appearance to the rest of the banner and if text crosses into this area it can hinder legibility.

The width of the weld line is typically 30mm in thickness.

Below are some example pole pocket sizes (based on the diameter of the pole) and how much clearance you need to give the text on your artwork. Please remember that plain colour and background imagery are fine within the clearance area.

Artwork clearance for pole pockets

These values work no matter which edge of the banner the pole pocket is situated.

The Summary

When ordering banners with pole pockets remember the following:

• Provide us with the diameter of the pole going into the pocket
• Give your artwork enough clearance
• This applies whether it is a single or double-sided banner

This is only meant as a guide to help you when ordering banners with pole pockets and we are always at the end of a phone should you have any issues, on 0845 604 1030.

Way back in March we announced that we had moved down the road from Chelmsford to Witham. Well, the main reason for this was to house the latest addition to our printer-family and to have it located closer to home (traditionally the majority of our print was handled further north).

This purchase and subsequent move has proven to be quite timely with us having our most productive year to date. Thanks to the team at CMYUK our new printer has hit the ground running and with only a few blips, has been invaluable to the business. Because of this we have had to change the way we process orders behind the scenes.

We develop all of our systems in-house which meant re-writing the admin system used to process our orders from the ground up. We finished the first stage and started trialling the new system in early December, and we’ve been debugging, fine-tuning and crying ourselves to sleep ever since.

This new system has come with added benefits to our customers, most notably the dispatch notifications and tracking now available on 90% of our orders.

This, combined with the VB Media websites we’ve developed, took up nearly all of last year, hence our slack approach to the blog.

Well, it’s a new year and we are still looking to expand our material and product range. We are looking into large-format paper/poster printing and the products that come with this. Exhibition displays and forecourt signage are other products due for release. These should be available to our trade customers soon, and although they will not be on the current retail site, they should still be available if required.

So, as we move into the new year you shall be hearing even more from us.

Fingers crossed for 2013.

Venture Banners' New Location

We’ve been in our Chelmsford office since November 2009, and in that time we’ve seen exponential business growth. Our team has got bigger, we’re dealing with more customers than ever before, and we’re printing more than we’ve ever printed. As a result, we’ve outgrown our current premises.

So we’re opening a new facility to house our sales, studio, and accounts departments, as well as a brand-new VUTEk printer. This will be the new home and cornerstone of Venture Banners.

We’ve enjoyed being in Chelmsford and would like to take this opportunity to thank our landlords and neighbouring businesses for putting up with us for as long as they have!

The When

We’re aiming to move over the course of the 6^th–8^th April, so it won’t be long at all.

There’s only a small amount of work we need to arrange before we move in, including a shiny new network installation and giving the production area both a lick of paint and some new lighting. Other than that, it’s ready to jump into.

The Where

Our new address will be:

Unit 10
Waterside Business Park
Eastways
Witham
Essex
CM8 3YQ

Though we would’ve liked to stay in Chelmsford, and we couldn’t stray too far from it (for staff travel reasons), the options in Witham made most sense for us.

How It Will Benefit Us

Up til now, our sales, studio, and accounts departments have been located in a different location to our production teams. Now though, that will be changing. Having all departments under one roof from start-to-finish will bring some big advantages over our current setup:

• Our sales, studio and production teams will be just metres away from each other, meaning better and quicker communication between all involved
• The process from point of order, to studio, to printing, to packing, to despatching will be seamless
• We won’t need to re-upload processed artwork for production—all files will be processed and served locally
• We’ll have enough parking for everyone
• We can be as noisy as we want!

How It Will Benefit You

Having everything together will bring improvements for our customers too:

• We hope to offer an express service for those in a hurry (a much requested service)
• We’ll be able to offer more real-time updates on most orders, including courier consignment numbers
• The new printer should give an improvement in print quality in most cases
• Pick-ups will now be possible if you would like to save on delivery costs

When we’re all settled in, you’ll be more than welcome to visit and have a full tour. We’re hoping this should be by around mid-May, and we’ll let you know when we’re ready for visits. We’ll be able to show you how much large-format printing can help you and your business.

And in case you were wondering, we won’t be raising any of our prices. We’re sure this will be one of those happy “win-win” situations for all involved.

With the all-round improvements this will bring to our (already growing) business, we can’t wait to get started in the new building—onwards and upwards!

Since then, the funding steadily grew and we were glad to see that on the 26th December, the project reached it’s funding goal. We’ve been sent our advance copies of the font, and are currently in the process of playing around with ideas for our logo and brand image.

If all goes to plan, we’ll hopefully see the font available on Google Web Fonts sometime during February.

So What’s Gonna Change?

Well, as we mentioned before, the biggest change will probably come in the form of typefaces. We’re aiming to make all our copy a little bit nicer to read—both in readability and appearance.

Though we’re still in the early stages of experimentation, we’re also looking at our image as a whole: colours, shapes and forms, icons, and overall design principles.

Venture Banners Colour Palette Ideas

Of course, when you do anything like this, consistency is key. Our last major brand change was in 2009, and we’ve realised that some of our existing customer-facing material has become dissimilar in some regards, so we’d like to fix that. These are the areas we’ll be looking at:

• Print
  • Stationery
    • Letterhead
    • Business Cards
    • Compliment Slip
    • Envelope
    • Presentation Folder
  • Marketing
    • Leaflets & Mailers
    • Magazine Ads
    • Trade Pack for new Trade customers
  • Letters from our Accounts dept.
• Online
  • Our Websites
    • Our main website
    • Our Trade website
    • Our blog
    • Our artwork upload service at WeTransfer
  • Email
    • Generated email from our websites and order processing system
    • Direct email from a team member
  • Third-party Websites and Social Networks
    • Google+
    • Facebook
    • Twitter

How and When’s it Gonna Happen?

As we always have done, we’ll be doing the design work in-house ourselves. We’re only dedicating a certain amount of time and a few members of our design team to this, so it may take a few months for our planned changes to be fully implemented and rolled out while any old designs and materials are phased out, especially while we’re working on other (exciting) projects. Some of the changes won’t take long at all, while others will likely depend on stocks of our current print material and when we’ll be needing more.

It’ll definitely be an ongoing process, but we’re building a set of design principles and constraints for ourselves to cover all future work across all mediums. This will aid the creation of new designs and help keep our image unified and consistent in the future.

We’re very excited with the ideas we’ve got floating around here, so we’ll be sure to keep you posted on any interesting news here on the blog.

Welcome to 2012, the year of the Olympics, UEFA European Championships and, if you believe the Mayan Long Count Calendar, the End of the World. Well, at Venture Banners we are going to have to continue under the assumption that the World is not going to end any time soon and look to what we can do in the large format print industry this year.

Last year saw us make some additions to our product range, including foamex and correx, flags and the Teardrop and Feather Flag stands (trade only).

This coming year we have even more developments ahead. These include:

• Soft signage – The demand for single sided printed flag-esque material is increasing and is widely seen as the next ‘big thing’ in the industry. The benefits of soft signage are easy installation and reduced delivery costs. Indoor use only.
• A fast turnaround service – We hope to implement an ‘I need it, like NOW!’ service in the coming months. We always get asked if we can turnaround a banner in the space of 12 hours, but because of our strict print-queue system this hasn’t been possible. However, with new machinery arriving this year we may now be able to offer this for a limited number of orders.
• Consignment numbers for deliveries – We hope to be trialing this soon with some test orders, and then rolling out across 95% of the orders we fulfill. This will be provided in the form of a ‘Dispatched’ email notification.
• Pop-Up display systems – One planned for later on in the year, but exhibition display systems are on the cards.
• Brand refresh – A simple freshening up of the Venture brand.
• New website – For the trade side of our business, giving increased functionality.
• Website development service - We are developing a service which will give our customers (specifically print-trade) the opportunity to have a fully-controllable and professional, large-format print website. More to come on this in the very near future.

With these developments in mind (plus a few others we have up our sleeves), we are hoping that 2012 turns into the year we are planning for.

Having been fortunate enough to work with websites and online content, it has become very easy to correct my mistakes. With just a few clicks, a mistake can be remedied, leaving no trace it was ever there. Unfortunately, with printed material, things aren’t so forgiving.

Whoops

Back when I was producing mainly print designs, I had my fair share of embarrassing moments when the delivery from the local printer turned up. It’s a horrible feeling. Especially when several thousand pounds have been spent on having your design printed, to then be posted to thousands of customers.

There are, however, some important tips to help prevent that kind of situation happening.

Check, Check, and Check Again

I can’t stress how important checking your work is.

Don’t rely solely on your software to do all your spell-checking for you. Yes, they can be useful aids, but they’re still nowhere near smart enough to understand the complexities of human language. You may well have spelled all the words in a design correctly according to the software, but don’t forget:

• Some software may be limited to USA spellings, or you might not have changed your dictionary language
• Some industry/business phrases, acronyms and words won’t ever appear in a real dictionary, so these will require manual checking
• Not all spell-checkers check for correct capitalisation
• Context: most spell-checkers can’t tell you if a word is (or isn’t) in the right place
• Correct punctuation is again related to context, and can’t yet be fully understood by our everyday software

Spell-checkers are named what they are, because that’s exactly what they do: check spelling. But there’s so much more to language than simply spelling. Think of it like a car—you might have all the correct individual parts, but if they aren’t put together in the right way, you won’t be going anywhere.

Two Pairs of Eyes are Better Than One

If you’ve been creating the design yourself, you’re likely ‘too close’ to the project to be the only proof-reader involved. This can easily blind you to your own errors. You can repeatedly miss an error in your own work, whereas someone else will immediately see it.

It’s always, always best to have someone else proof-read your work. It’s good to have a colleague available to check your work before it gets committed to print and seen out in the real world. Even if you think you’re the most competent person with the English language in the world, don’t underestimate how important it is to have someone else’s eyes giving your work the ‘once over’.

A real word with the correct spelling. But completely the wrong word for the context!

Even if you don’t have someone on hand to proof-read your work, it can sometimes help to print your design on your office printer. For some reason, seeing it on physical media can help you spot errors in your own work.

Mistakes Incoming, 12 O’Clock!

Because of the sheer amount of designs we deal with on a daily basis, we do quite often spot spelling mistakes on artwork supplied to us. In these instances, if we notice the mistake early enough, we notify customers of the error before it gets passed through to our production team, and allow the customer to make the call on whether to re-supply the design or go ahead. If the mistake has already been printed, there’s little we can do to help, sadly.

This is again another reason to have spelling checked: mistakes can be costly, especially when dealing with large-format prints. If the text is large, the mistake can be glaringly obvious too!

Mistakes: Learn From Them, You Must

If you’re in a position where you regularly churn out design work or create content, mistakes will happen—it can’t be helped. But as I’ve said above, things can be done to reduce the chances of mistakes happening.

The best thing to do when they do happen is to learn where things went wrong. Was it a mistake in the content supplied to you? Was it not passed on to someone for proof-reading? It’s worth trying to find out where the mistake occurred, not to apportion blame, but to help avoid similar things happening in the future.

Unfortunately, the blame for mistakes will normally be laid at the feet of the last set of eyes that saw the work before it went to print. However, having worked in that process for over five years in my previous job, I do have much sympathy for the designers. At one point, we got so fed up of being blamed for every mistake, we ensured a proof-read by the department manager was required before anything could go to print. It was another step in the process (albeit a red-tape-esque one), but it was important for both our protection and the improvement to the quality of the work we sent out.

Oh, and if you found any mistakes in this post, they were of course deliberate!

The usual process for a company re-brand is to plan everything internally, ahead of time, behind closed doors, and then launch it all at once. But we’re going to try something different.

We’ve had our current branding for a couple of years now, and it has been (and still is) serving us well.

Venture Banners Logo (Vertical)

We want a brand refresh, but importantly, not an outright re-brand. We have an established brand image with our customers, so we’re going to freshen it up, make it better, and refine it.

Typefaces

The biggest changes will probably be with the typography. For the logotype and brand mark, we’ve been using advent, while for body copy, we’ve been using Trebuchet MS.

Advent is nice enough in it’s own way, but there are some niggles when using it out in the real world. Some of the characters don’t work that well, and can be illegible in certain contexts. Trebuchet is fairly nice overall, and although it’s available by default on many computers, it’s by no means ubiquitous across them all.

Over the past few months, we’ve been enjoying the use of Google Web Fonts, which enables the use of free, open-source fonts on the web that users wouldn’t normally have installed. Because the fonts at Google Web Fonts are free and open-source, this means you can use them anywhere, without any licencing restrictions. This includes downloading them and using them in printed work.

Venture Banners Logo (Horizontal)

So we’ve been thinking: wouldn’t it be great if you could have really nice fresh modern fonts, and be able to use them for free, both on the web and in our printed material? That’s why we’re hoping to start using fonts available from Google for all of our public-facing media: websites, leaflets, letters, and adverts.

We’ve already tried out Open Sans, which we find great for body copy and smaller text. It has a nice fresh, legible, and friendly feel about it, which is just what we’re looking for to replace Trebuchet.

Open Sans (Specimen)

For the brand typeface, we like the style of ‘sister fonts’ Neo Sans and Neo Tech. Like Open Sans, they have a modern, friendly feel, but also don’t look too informal, and retain a reliable, robust image.

The sad thing with commercial fonts like these though, is that they can be very expensive once you start considering all the different weights involved (light, regular, semi-bold, bold, etc.). There are also problems with restrictions when it comes to using them on other mediums, such as the web. Even if use on the web is allowed, it could involve hosting the files on your own server, thereby increasing bandwidth load for you and your users. We’re by no means against paying for fonts, but we’d prefer to have as few limitations as possible.

This is why we’d much rather use a font from Google Web Fonts. This would bring the following benefits:

• The font would be free
• It’s incredibly easy to implement for use online
• No additional bandwidth load on our server
• No restrictions on where the font can be used
• If someone has visited another site also using the same font from Google, they will likely already have the font stored in their browser cache, making font loading process speedier
• Our website would receive all updates and improvements to the font without us lifting a finger

Exo Sans (Specimen)

Luckily for us, a project was recently launched by Natanael Gama in Portugal on Kickstarter, in an effort to fund his font, ‘Exo Sans‘ to become available for the world on Google Web Fonts. Exo Sans caught our eye, and we immediately wanted to use it.

As you can see in the typeface specimen images, both Open Sans and Exo Sans have a big family of varying weights, which is very helpful.

Two of us have already pledged towards the project, and although it’s not yet fully funded, it’s got a little while left, so we’d encourage those that would be interested in using it to put something towards the goal. It’s a simple process: you can choose how much to donate, and depending on how much you donate, you can opt for some nice treats if the project succeeds. Also worth noting is that if the project doesn’t reach it’s target funding, no-one is charged a penny.

If Exo Sans succeeds in reaching it’s goal, anyone will be able to use it on any website, or to download the font to use anywhere they like.

The Brand Mark

We expect that the brand mark will stay largely the same, as we still like it, and we think it works. We’ll probably tidy up a couple of details and make some subtle improvements, but we think it will still be very recognisable as the Venture Banners that our customers already know.

Future Plans

We’re not sure exactly when we’ll be starting the brand refresh, but it will likely depend on the availability of Exo Sans, and if it reaches the funding target.

We hope to document our process and share the things we decide to do, here on the blog. Hopefully it will be of interest to the designer types, and might even help give you some ideas.

While much of our business is run online or via email, some dealings require us to send paperwork in the post. And when you send printed material to customers, business partners and associates, it goes without saying that you need to make a good impression. However, when many of your customers are in the print trade themselves, like ours, that becomes even more important.

So when it came to designing our own stationery, we wanted to give that good impression.

Contrary to what many seem to believe, we don’t actually do lithographic or stationery printing ourselves. We specialise in large-format banner printing, so we’re happy to leave the smaller-format stuff to the experts. For our own stationery, we often use Douglas (formerly MyPrintLink). Several team members have used them for years, and in previous jobs, and we’ve been extremely impressed by their level of service, competitive prices, and print quality.

Venture Banners Letterhead

The vast majority of our printed customer communication is done on our letterhead. This is used for all of our invoices, credit statements, and letters, obviously. It’s printed on 120gsm bond paper, double-sided, with an orange background and over-sized logo on the reverse.

We also have a bespoke-cut folder, which is used for customer communication where that little bit of extra finesse and presentation is required. It’s printed on 350gsm silk card, and has spot UV finishing on the logos, both front and back. The folder keeps everything together, allows the placement of a business card in the lower-right corner on the inside, and quite frankly, looks awesome.

Venture Banners Business Card

The Business Card

As we’re a mostly online-based business, we don’t tend to use our business cards as often as some traditional businesses might, but that’s no excuse for being slack on presentation, so we decided to give them a little something extra. First-off, we put in some faux hems and eyelets on the reverse—a signature of banner printing, also seen on our brand mark.

We also took the opportunity of them being printed on both sides to add a little bonus. We seem to like using an over-sized version of our logo where possible, so we split it between the front and the back. If you have one card, it appears as though the design simply wraps around the back, and that’s great. But if you have two cards, and put them together, the logo matches up! Admittedly, this probably won’t happen often, but we still love it!

This millimeter-precise type of design is a nightmare for printers, but to their credit, Douglas did an excellent job of ensuring spacings were equal and things matched up. The cards are printed on 350gsm silk card, with matte lamination all over, which looks and feels great.

Venture Banners Trade Business Card

We also have another business card specifically for Trade clients. This uses the same idea as the standard business card, with our Trade brand mark wrapped around the side.

Stationery, But Never Stationary

This stationery has been in use for a while now, and we’ve been toying with the idea of updating our brand and logo. We’ve got a couple of ideas, and we’ll post more on this soon.

We find ourselves facing challenging economic conditions and they are not being made any easier by the rising number of companies going bust to avoid their debt and then starting up again the very next day with a different name and a clean bill of health.

Obviously there are companies that take the insolvency route because they’ve investigated all the available options and have chosen that particular way out of their current situation. At Venture Banners, we like to think we take the time build up a good rapport with our customers. We also like to think we offer a pretty unique service, so on the odd occasion when one of our trade customers does go pop, they will usually phone us and ask for our help, thus keeping the relationship intact. The end result is: the client gets to keep a valued supplier, while our financial exposure is minimised.

However,  I am more interested in talking about the absolute scum that start a company, build up debt and then go bust only start up the next day with a slightly different name ( you know who you are, Apple Print.info), leaving their suppliers licking their wounds with little chance of getting any money back—the so-called Phoenix companies.

‘Phoenix’… sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? A magical mythical bird of fire, though the reality of Phoenix companies is anything but. While researching the subject, I was shocked to hear a story from a very large printing company that had a long-standing customer who went bust owing them thirty thousand pounds, only to phone the very next week with a new company name expecting the same trading and credit terms! Astonishingly naive.

The ripple effect of a company going bust can often be huge, creating cash flow issues and on occasion making the perfectly legitimate supplying company late in paying its own debts and finding its own credit score being adversely affected.

When we were knocked for £1,300 earlier this year (see above) I contacted the nastiest debt recovery people I could find: Shotgun, Knuckleduster and Blade Ltd… or something like that. Not becuase of the money, but the fact that the b***dards who had built up this debt were practically laughing down the phone at me, but do you know what, they were protected by law, so Shotgun, Knuckleduster and Blade Ltd could do nothing to help.

I personally don’t know how these people who Phoenix can sleep at night, very comfortably with our money in the bank probably. If you are one of these people who do the Pheonix thing I have some words of advice; You can’t run bath water, let alone a company, do us all a favour and find yourself a job, you’re obviously not an Entrepreneur.

With this in mind I thought I would just write a short post on the best types of images to use on your banner, whether created by yourselves or to be sent through to us so we can do the design work for you.

Artifacts on JPG Images

JPG (or JPEG) Images

Probably the most popular file format on most people’s PCs, the JPG or JPEG format is a great file format for digital imagery as it allows for easy scaling down of images.

Beware though, this scaling down is not in size but in quality – ever noticed those ‘artifacts’ around parts of a photo, particularly around smooth contrasting areas like text.

If these artifacts are on an image used for a banner then they will also be printed. But please do also bear in mind that this may not affect the overall look of the banner when viewed from a distance.

TIFF Images

TIFF imagery is probably my preferred format for bitmap imagery (photographic imagery as opposed to illustrative imagery). It does also have it’s own compression as well (more commonly LZW) which is lossless – this means that the image quality remains the same but the file size is reduced. This makes TIFF images ideal for banners so that the entire image is preserved.

With TIFF and JPG imagery, it now just comes down to resolution, for further information on this, check out one of our previous posts on the best resolution for banner imagery.

Vector Images

Vector imagery is perfect for ANY size of print. Vector images are infinitely scalable so no matter what size artwork you have they will always appear as they were intended. If you have had a logo done by a professional company/individual then a vector version of the logo should have been provided. This will be in an .ai, .eps or maybe a .pdf format (although these may contain bitmap imagery and are not guaranteed to be vector-based), and ensures your logo looks perfect on all printed materials (although colour representation is another issue altogether).

This vector graphics article on Wikipedia may help to explain things further.

Hopefully this information will help the next time you come to order your Vinyl PVC Banners.

If you are looking to create your own artwork for banners, why not have a read through of the following:

• Blog article – Studio Time: Artwork Requirements Overview
• Venture Banners – Our Artwork Requirements