It is a New Year, and at Manifest Creative we are very excited to announce that our Montana web and graphic design studio has a fresh new home. On December 1st of 2009 we officially moved into our new office located at 21000 Frontage Road, Suite #6 in Belgrade, MT.

Outdoor signage facing Frontage Road installed by Kelly Kapinos of Signs and Designs, now adorns the iPark professional building which is the new home for Manifest Creative.

There is still a fair amount of work ahead to get the studio decorated to our liking and equipped with the latest in proper design gadgetry, but our new space is already rewarding us with many advantages that our previous location simply couldn’t.

Anyhow, we wanted to offer a few sneak peaks at our new studio before we throw some paint and stuff on the walls. After all… as designers we have all kinds of ideas of what we’d like to do with the place!

If the photos don’t quite give you the full perspective, you are always welcome to drop by and say hello. Our regular hours of operation are 9AM to 5PM, but we frequently work extended hours. If the lights are on, you’ll probably catch us!

This logo was designed for a web-based company specializing in multi-carrier shipping solutions.

When Mark Sanborn needed a logo for his web-based multi-carrier shipping business RocketShip.it, he looked up Manifest Creative. The logo features a unique typeface and a custom designed illustration of a rocket.

This logo says it all… it is for a mechanic named JR who performs quality truck and automotive repair in Bozeman, MT. JR is an independent mechanic who needed a professional logo to help establish his repair business. He wanted a logo that quickly portrayed his specialized trade.

Other services performed for JR’s Truck Repair:

• Business card design
• Truck decal design
• Sticker design

When Equis Feed wanted a full color brochure to showcase their new line of feeds, they trusted the job to Manifest Creative.Equis Feed contacted us to create a full color brochure to help get consumers and dealers interested in their new line of quality horse feeds. We designed a roll-fold, four panel 8.5″ x 11″ full color brochure that was perfect for the occasion.

Other services we have provided for Equis Feed:

• Consulting
• Banner design

Full Circle Indoor Kart Racing contacted Manifest Creative to design a full color brochure that would get people racing to their business.

Since we had already designed several of his logos, Craig Beuning of Full Circle Racing contacted us to create his full color brochure. As anyone who has ever spun a few laps at the FCR track will tell you, go kart racing is a total blast. Knowing that, we created a brochure that is fun and exciting… just like the company it portrays!

Other services we have provided Full Circle Racing:

• Logo design
• Gift certificate design
• Post card design
• Poster design
• Advertising design
• Sticker design
• Consultation

The Mental Health Providers Association of Idaho (MHPAI) choose Manifest Creative to design and print a professional pamphlet.Not long after we had designed a new logo for the Mental Health Providers Association of Idaho (MHPAI), we were asked to again help them in designing a brochure/pamphlet for a seminar they were going to host. The pamphlet would need to include times and dates of the multi-day seminar, information about the MHPAI organization, bios on the doctors presenting and a tear-off registration form for attendees. The piece also had to be easy to mail and had to conform to to U.S. postal standards for size and weight.

Once we had received all the information needed from MHPIA to include in the pamphlet, it was apparent that a standard 8.5″ x 11″ sized brochure would not be suitable for this project. Instead, we opted for a much larger 11″ x 17″ trifold brochure that would give us plenty of room to include all the necessary information. To keep the cost of the project down, we went with two color printing and interesting duotone photos. The resulting brochure was a great looking printed pamphlet that exceeded the goals of the project.

Other services we’ve performed for MHPAI include:

• Professional logo design
• MHPAI informational brochure
• Custom seminar name tags

When RainDrain Seamless Gutters in Bozeman, Montana needed custom brochure to highlight their services, they contacted the graphic design and web development studio of Manifest Creative.The gutter business is a highly competitive market in southwest Montana, so Kristin White of RainDrain Seamless Gutters hired us to create a new logo and marketing materials to give her business a competitive advantage. We provided RainDrain with one of our complete business identity packages which included a custom logo, business cards, letterhead and envelopes and a full color brochure.

Other services we’ve performed for RainDrain include:

• Logo, business card, letterhead and envelope business identity package
• Vehicle graphics
• “While You Were Out” door hanger
• Electronic letterhead template
• Print advertising design

These are the photos of the installation of a custom vinyl vehicle wrap designed by Manifest Creative and installed by Signs & Designs. If you would like read more about this vehicle wrap, please see the other post called  It’s A Wrap! – Vinyl Vehicle Graphics Make a Mobile Billboard

A few weeks ago I was contacted by Kelly Kapinos of Signs & Designs in Bozeman, about designing a vehicle wrap for one of his clients. I had been wanting to design a wrap for awhile, and knowing that Kelly and I have worked well together on a few other projects… I jumped at the opportunity.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with “wrapping”, it is the art of printing graphic design elements on high performance vinyl and then applying that vinyl to a chosen surface. In our case, the client wanted to wrap the back half of his truck to promote his taxidermy services.

One of the first steps of this project was taking precise measurements of the vehicle, this is also one of the most important parts of the project as it determines how much vinyl it will take to achieve the desired results. Kelly took down all the measurements and then handed them off to me, along with photographs of the vehicle, so I could begin the next step of the process… finding appropriate artwork.

Searching for artwork proved to be one of the most challenging parts of the entire wrap. Our client wanted a bear snarling, which is easy enough… but finding an image large enough to be nearly life sized was difficult to say the least. Luckily for me, I eventually found a perfect image from Canadian photographer John Pitcher, and by contacting John directly, we were able to settle on a fair price for the photo.

With the photo and measurements in hand, it finally time to get to the design phase. With the creative software on my hard working Macintosh, I was able to show the client how the image would look on his vehicle before the vinyl was even printed. This also allowed Kelly the opportunity to show the client how the lettering would look as well. This allowed for any tweaking to be done and for the client to be satisfied with the overall design prior to the actual application.

I should note here that half wraps can be somewhat difficult to pull off. The challenge lies in creating a design that effectively covers half of the vehicle, but yet is designed in way that makes the transition from the paint of the vehicle to the graphic elements of the vinyl pleasing to the eye. This is something I think the design I came up with does very well, and luckily for me the client agreed too.

With the green light on the design, I burned a DVD of the rather large image files to give to Kelly. He then took the files and printed them to vinyl on his large format printer at his custom shop in Four Corners. Hours later with the printing complete, it was finally time for the highly anticipated install. It took a full day and part of another for the complete install, but as usual, Kelly did a fantastic job… and I think the finished results speak for themselves!

During the installation I talked Kelly into letting me tag along and snap some photos of the process. Check out the install photos for an idea of the hard work involved in creating a wrap like this. After seeing it in person, my sincere congratulations go to Kelly and the team at Signs & Designs for a job very well done.

Well that’s it for now, but keep your eye out for this rolling billboard around the streets of Bozeman. I hope you get to see it in person, because the photos in this post really don’t do it justice. As always, please leave us your comments below.

THE ESPERANZA CENTER, a community-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides SW Montana youth and their families with equine-facilitated education and therapy, announces that its new logo, designed by David Howlett of Bozeman’s Manifest Creative, has been awarded the Logo Of The Day award for February 6, 2009 by the internationally-recognized logo-design website www.logooftheday.com. Manifest Creative, a Bozeman graphic design and web development company, has generously donated its services to help share The Esperanza Center’s alternative education and therapy vision with the community. The Esperanza Center gratefully thanks Manifest Creative and congratulates David Howlett for the well-deserved, professional award.

The community is invited to view, comment, and vote for the new logo design on www.logooftheday.com. For more information about The Esperanza Center visit www.theesperanzacenter.com or call 406.600-4022. Contact Manifest Creative at www.manifestbozeman.com or by calling 406.585.9406.

You can view the logo in use at the Esperanza Center’s temporary website:

http://www.theesperanzacenter.com

You can also view a cool animated progression of the logo development:

http://manifestbozeman.com/blog/2008/12/19/cool-animation-of-the-progression-of-a-logo/

And if you you still want more info, you can read the full story behind the logo progression:

http://manifestbozeman.com/blog/2008/12/17/logo-progression-local-non-profit-gets-a-new-look/

Thanks for stopping by the Manifest Creative marketing blog! Please be sure to vote for the Esperanza Center logo and as always, we would love to hear your comments!