At 70, Tara VanDerveer will soon be the most successful college basketball coach of all time. She believes in experimentation, asking for help, and the art of the controlled meltdown.
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Every time we hold our regular WeLink conference, I always find time to challenge our people on how to make everything a little faster. In the sportswear customization business, high speed beats low price. How we always wanted that a customer would wait only for 5 minutes to get his or her first unit of customized sports uniform.
My best piece of advice is summarized in 3 phrases. Think big. Act small. Master your craft. If you want to start your own business, you need to THINK BIG so you can see the entire picture. That also means you need to study the industry and look for opportunities or possible niches that you can specialize in. Some entrepreneurs fall victims of the usual start-your-own-business seminars where they teach you how to produce a product like soap, candles, or any other simple items, and convince you that you don't need a big capital for that. Then, you realize in the end that what matters most is the marketing side of the business amidst the strong competition. Then, you end up not being able to sell anything. The reason is that those seminars are think-small and easy-to-start ideas. Always THINK BIG by studying about the unmet needs of the market, about the bigger picture in the industry, and what is required to compete. After seeing the big picture, you might be overwhelmed by the vastness of the industry and the amount of work or capital needed to start your venture. That overwhelming feeling may not inspire you and may push you to procrastinate. To overcome this, you need to ACT SMALL. Segment the market into smaller pieces, find a niche, do something in small scale, and start immediately. After all, you already know about the bigger picture and you know where your small act will end if it will succeed. By acting small, you can break the inertia and build a momentum. By acting small, you will also need less capital, time, and effort to start the venture. The next thing you need to do is MASTER YOUR CRAFT. Since you started small and with focus, you can afford to master your niche and do better than competition. Slowly gain momentum and expand your scale. In my 15 years as an entrepreneur with several ventures, I learned about these 3 simple steps to get my ideas running once they hit the ground.
Infographics (a clipped compound of information and graphics) is a graphic visual representation of information, data or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly. Infographics can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends. Infographics have evolved in recent years to be for mass communication and thus are designed with fewer assumptions about the readers' knowledge base than other types of visualizations. Isotypes are an early example of infographics conveying information quickly and easily to the masses. INFOGRAPHICS CASE STUDY The infographics below was created by Customer Magnetism (CM), a full-service agency offering creative, social, content, design and development. It shows a case study about infographic. It has already generated hundreds of favorable social media signals, over two thousand unsolicited, inbound links (including sites like adobe.com) and has already generated nearly 100,000 pageviews. Business success requires wisdom, focus, and skillful execution. Interestingly, the top performing companies possess the strategic world-view of large global enterprises and strong team commitment more common among small businesses. This is the premise of Think Big, Act Small: How America's Best Performing Companies Keep the Start-Up Spirit Alive. It’s an enlightening book by Jason Jennings which examines the growth of thousands of companies, both public and private. The most successful companies (those who experienced more than 10% annual growth in revenue and profitability over a 10 year period) shared a simple philosophy: think big while acting small. Jennings’ research also found that companies who think small tend to stay small and those that begin to act big tend to get into trouble. Winning cultures reside in the upper right hand quadrant of this matrix (i.e., think big / act small):
A good sportswear design graphics enhances the shape and contour of the human anatomy". If the guiding principle in making a good sportswear graphics is the enhancement of the human anatomy, then the basic concepts that we learned in school can be applied. We were taught that to highlight contours and shapes, we must use shading, contrast, shapes, curves, etc. Enumerated below are a few of the guiding principles that can help us become a great sportswear designer. LIGHT MAKES MIGHT Lighter shades and gradients on the muscle areas like chest, abs, biceps, and arms make the latter more prominent and enhance shape and contour of the human body. The sample designs below show distinct lighter shade and gradient on the chest area and includes texture and shapes on the abs area, making the design look more masculine. BLADES CUT SHAPES To enhance a shape on a body, the use of blades, curves, and pointed geometrical shapes add to the enhancement of the area that we want to highlight. For example, to create an illusion of narrow waist, the use of blades on the sides can help. DON'T IGNORE THE COLOR WHEEL Like death and taxes, there is no escaping color. The use of color can be considered an exact science despite the fact that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Very often, it happens that at first glance, you may consider one color combination more appealing and pleasing than another. That is because it is a fact that violating the use of the 6 color harmonies can create negative appeal and impression. To learn more about it, you may visit http://www.sessions.edu/color-calculator. It is an amazing color calculator that suggests the other colors that you can combine with your first chosen color. An ideal example is the logo of Los Angeles Lakers team. If you use the calculator, you will find out that Lakers use complementary color harmonies, wherein gold yellow is the complementary of violet. TOUCH IT, FEEL IT, SEE IT.
Texture is an element that plays an important role in design and is defined by two aspects - visual and tactile (sometimes referred to as feel or hand). Tactile texture is a surface quality related closely to our sense of touch. All the clothes we wear feel differently to the skin and to our hand. Tactile texture is very much dependent on the type of fabric that we use to make our sportswear. Some fabrics are soft, others are rough. There are fabrics that are weaved like honeycomb. Others are weaved satin or plain. What is more important to a sportswear designer is visual texture because it can be controlled and can be changed easily to fit a specific design concept. It is not dependent on the type of fabric. Rich, layered graphics can create visual texture that mirrors actual texture. Graphical textures can make a plain boring fabric look astonishing and elegant. Texture can also be modified and enriched with gradients to emphasize geometrical shapes and enhance body shapes. A good example is the design below. Simple diagonal lines created a rugged texture creating an illusion of a metal surface. The gradients made it look more three-dimensional and enhances the body contour. |
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January 2024
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