The “Leaving Planet Earth” Sticker Campaign

At O2 Creative, we have a lot of hometown pride. We consider it a privilege to live and work in the Fraser Valley, with its beautiful mountain landscapes, endless activities, and quirky bohemian charm.

We thought the town’s iconic “Leaving Planet Earth” city limits sign was such a fun way to express the unique Fraser lifestyle. In many ways, this town really is “out of this world.”

We were a little bummed when the Leaving Planet Earth signs were recently removed from the city limits signage. (Whyyy!?) We wanted our town’s extraterrestrial reputation to live on either way, so we designed these fun stickers to keep the sign alive.

Perhaps you’ve seen them around by now. The big green stickers are popping up more and more on car bumpers, snowboards, guitar cases, and all the other fun places stickers get stuck.

We wanted to get a little more out of this particular campaign, though. We wanted the stickers to do more than simply represent our community. We hope to give something back to the community as well.

That’s why we’re taking a unique direction with this campaign. We’re offering the stickers for just $3 bucks a piece. Or, simply bring non-perishable food items into the O2 office (you know, canned goods – soups, tuna, peanut butter – stuff like that). For every food item you bring in, we’ll give you a sticker for it!

All the proceeds we can raise and all the food we can collect will be going to our friends at the Mountain Family Center in Hot Sulphur Springs. This nonprofit organization provides food and help to Grand County residents. Their services are invaluable to our communities, and they could always use more support themselves, which is why we hope to help them with our sticker campaign.

In fact, if you’re already closer to the Hot Sulphur Springs-side of the county, you can simply stop by the Mountain Family Center to support them. They even have some of our Leaving Planet Earth stickers, so if you make any donations or canned food contributions directly to them, you’ll still get hooked up with a sweet sticker! While supplies last!

We like to have fun with our campaigns. We also like to help out a good cause in our community. So if you want to score a super cool sticker that represents our hometown, while also supporting and strengthening our community, stop by O2 Creative today.

We’re located in downtown Fraser at 345 Zerex Street, in our new (to us) office on the corner of Eisenhower and Highway 40. If you pay us a visit, we’d be happy to hook you up. Or, if you’re out of the area, we can mail you stickers as well. Simply send us a check made out to O2 Creative, as well as a self-addressed and stamped envelope, to:

O2 Creative
PO Box 1349
Winter Park, CO 80482

You can also contact us by phone at 970-726-8021, or email us at [email protected]

You can do it to support the Mountain Family Center, and all the folks in Grand County who depend on them. Or you can do it just for the stickers. Either way, just “doo eet!”

Click here for our next blog – e-commerce websites!

Case Study: The Foundry

When The Foundry Cinema & Bowl came to Winter Park, they approached O2 Creative with an interesting task: build a brand from scratch. We welcomed the opportunity (we’re kind of dorks like that) and promptly began developing ideas for every detail of the brand development.

Fortunately, we were well aware of the work we had cut out for us. We knew we had to design a logo, signage, a website, rack cards, business cards, posters, advertisements, and lots of other media, not to mention all the other little efforts it takes to make a brand successful.

We knew we had to remain consistent in our branding efforts, so customers could consistently recognize The Foundry’s brand. We also knew everything we designed had to lend itself to the marketability of The Foundry as a whole. We had to express the market identity The Foundry sought to achieve.

We began by designing a logo. We worked closely with The Foundry to create exactly the logo they wanted. In this case, they hoped for a retro-industrial sort of style. We ultimately came up with a classic round logo and combined it with a more modern letter font, which yielded us a handsome logo that we think is bold, clean, and recognizable.

We took The Foundry’s new logo and began applying it to other branding efforts. We designed The Foundry’s outdoor sign that lights up big and bright along Highway 40. We think the retro-inspired logo looks especially sharp atop The Foundry’s old school factory-inspired building.

We then wanted some tangible marketing media; something that The Foundry could pass along to customers. With the goal of building brand awareness for The Foundry in mind, we created an integrated mix of branded marketing materials – everything from business cards…

…to pizza boxes.

After we designed The Foundry’s tangible media, we agreed it was time to get digital. We designed a website and mobile website, both of which make extensive use of The Foundry’s branding and logo. Now The Foundry has a robust online presence. Customers can look up movie times, menus, and bowling info from computers, tablets, and even smart phones.

We continue to work closely with The Foundry, creating new media to promote all the new events at the cinema and bowling alley. Whenever The Foundry has new movies, bowling events, food and drink specials, or live music shows, we’ll design some fresh promotional media. Each promotion consistently has The Foundry’s familiar round logo and design, which helps maintain and grow brand awareness.

Overall, this is just a few of our branding and marketing efforts for The Foundry. Each element has played a role in helping The Foundry become the successful brand it is today.

We’d also like to mention that we actually enjoy helping our clients with branding efforts. We like the creative challenge of helping a business express its identity to a market. We even kind of have fun with it! With that said, we’d be happy to help you build your brand. If you or your business has any questions with branding, marketing, or design, please contact us. Let’s get creative together!

To contact O2 Creative, call us at 970-726-8021 or email [email protected].

Click here for our next blog post – Leaving Planet Earth!

The New Office!

Yes, we have moved! After spending most of the long weekend packing and unpacking, we are finally settling into the new space. Our location is now 345 Zerex Street, on the corner of Highway 40 and Eisenhower in Fraser. Last Tuesday was the first day we were officially open for business in the new location. To celebrate the new office’s grand opening, we felt a toast was in order, so we enjoyed morning mimosas toasted in oh-so-classy red party cups.

When we began our search for a new office we wanted a better location, more space, and more features. So far, we’ve gotten all that and more.

Our new office affords us a location with even more exposure. We’ve been in downtown Fraser for a while now, but now we’re even that much more downtown. We have a sweet new sign on the awning over our front door, displaying big and bright over Eisenhower. A second sign is also in the works, soon to be displaying right along the highway for all to admire.

The new space also actually has more space. The old cabin office had its charms, but this place feels like it’s at least twice as big. Between the wide room, lots of windows, and more actual square footage, we now have more space to stretch – both our legs, and our ideas.

With our new office comes new everything – new furniture, new decorations, a new coat of bright green paint on the walls, even a new bed for the pups.

Our new space has new features as well. We have a large conference table for important meetings and brainstorm sessions.

We also have a lounge area in the corner, complete with a big cushy couch, for those times when we want a meeting to be a little more comfy.

Indeed, we found our better location, bigger space, and new features. It’s even starting to feel like the office we wanted all along, though we’re still putting some finishing touches on the place. Even though there’s still a little unpacking and decorating to do, the office is just beginning to have that familiar, broken-in sort of feel.

So, now that we’re just getting settled in, we’re pretty sure the only thing our new location is missing is…you! Most importantly, we wanted our new office to be a space we could share. We wanted somewhere for us to sit down and comfortably collaborate with clients and share stories with friends. So seriously – stop by and say hello! (mimosas optional).

O2 Creative Design, your Website Design, Graphic Design, all in one marketing stop!

Click here for our next blog – The Foundry!

Goodbye, little cabin office…

This is a transitional time in O2 Creative. For those who haven’t heard, we’re moving! This is the last week in our quaint little cabin office. Since 2009 we have operated at 208 Eisenhower, right in downtown Fraser, just a stone’s throw from the train tracks.

This cabin has been more than just an office. It’s been a haven for creativity. It’s been a meeting venue for clients and friends. And it’s been a place for the pugs to snooze, play, and…well, mostly snooze. It’s also been cool to say we work in a cabin, which adds to the mystique of working and living in the mountains.

This location has served us well, but alas, the time to move has come. O2 as a company has been growing – more clients, more projects, more employees. With all that growing also came the need for more office space as well.

So where will we be moving? Right down the street, actually. The address will be 345 Zerex Street, or more commonly referred to as “that red building on 40 on the corner across from the gas station.” Our front door will still be on the Eisenhower side of the road, so we’ll still be able to hear each and every train that comes through town, but hopefully it won’t be quite as crazy loud as it has been in the cabin.

This is the point in the blog where we’d usually have a photo – in this case, a cool pic of the new office. However, the new place is still getting some finishing touches. We still have a little painting and cleaning. We still need to furnish the space. And we still need to hang our sweet new O2 signs on the signpost and awning. It’s just not very photogenic quite yet. So please wait for a pic of the new place until we’re a little more settled in.

But until then, at least check out our sweet new signs. They’ll be hanging big and bright right over our office in the middle of downtown Fraser…soon!

We’ll have more space with all-new furnishings, including a lounge-conference area. What better way to do business than while seated comfortably on an overstuffed couch?

But for the time being, we have lots of packing and moving on our agenda, on top of an already busy work schedule. We hope to be all unpacked and settled in by next week. Until then, please look forward to seeing us in our new location, because we sure are looking forward to it.

Just remember – we’ll still be the same O2 Creative either way. We’ll still be located in downtown Fraser, just now even more downtown. We’ll still offer the coolest designs and the cleverest campaigns. And we’ll still have an office full of playful puppies ready to greet anyone who comes in.

So we’d like to invite you to visit our new office. Feel free to stop by and check out the new space, have a sit on our couch, give the pugs a pet. Just please give us a little time to unpack.

Click here for our next blog post – The New Office!

Livin’ the Pug Life

At O2 Creative, we’re animal lovers. Anyone who has ever visited us in the O2 office quickly realizes one thing – the dogs are in charge here. Wylie, Sophie, and Thumbelina roam throughout our office, setting the professional tone for the workday. From early Monday until late Friday, the pups are in the office, regardless of rain, wind, snow, sleet, sickness, or even a bad hair day.

The morning usually begins by responding to lots of important emails.

They eagerly await the arrival of clients, business contacts, and FedEx deliveries. Well, they’re mostly just eager for the FedEx guy, because he gives them treats.

They stay so busy, there’s no time at all to get out of the office. Well…okay, maybe there’s just enough time for a nice walk…

But they can’t walk for too long. Gotta get back to the office – they have to sit in on lots of important meetings.

The pooch’s greatest professional strength would have to be their teamwork abilities. They put their heads together to tackle some of the biggest group projects…like napping (which is coincidentally another professional strength of theirs).

At this point, perhaps you’re thinking all this puppy in the office business is silly – that it’s not actually hard work, it’s just the proverbial piece of cake…

But, we assure you, these pups all take their jobs very  seriously. It’s all stone-faced business as usual. Does Wylie look like he’s joking around?

To meet these pups in person, stop by and say hello at the O2 Creative office. You can also follow Pugs and Buggs on Facebook.

Click here for our next blog – Goodbye to the cabin office!

The benefits of hiring a graphic designer

Some businesses may frequently wonder whether hiring a graphic designer is worth it. They’re usually concerned about professional design work costing too much, or perhaps they feel they should simply do the design work themselves.

Believe it or not, though, hiring a professional designer might actually save you money in the long run. It’s also even more likely to save you another valuable resource: time. And a designer can help you focus the vision you have for your business. Good designers use their expertise to help you create recognizable graphics that make you stand out, communicate your value to your market, and make your business look even more polished and professional.

First of all, hiring a graphic designer really can save money. Sure, you can try to design your own graphics, but if you don’t know how to prepare a graphic for a printer, the cost of revising and reprinting your materials can quickly become even pricier than simply hiring a designer right from the start. Designers have the know-how to make sure graphics and marketing materials are designed and prepared correctly the first time. (If you aren’t familiar with terms like bleed marks, cropping, or CMYK, we recommend consulting a professional designer before trying to produce designs).

Graphic designers can also save you time. Many businesses pride themselves on self-sufficiency, but trying to do design work can quickly become a time-consuming frustration if you don’t know what you’re doing. Say, for instance, your plumbing broke. You could spend all the time and effort trying to fix the plumbing yourself, sure. However, if you’ve never done any plumbing work before, simply hiring a plumber who already has the knowledge and tools is usually a much more cost- and time-efficient way to get the problem fixed.

A good designer has the skills and experience, as well as the industry-standard design software and programs, to do even better work in even less time. Let’s face it – time is at a premium for most businesses. Your time is best spent focusing on the operations of your business, not trying to create graphics that a designer could do better, faster, and cheaper. Hiring a professional to do design work for you means you can spend your precious time on other important matters, like managing your business, meeting with clients, and fixing the plumbing.

A graphic designer can also help improve the look and feel of your business. A professionally trained designer with state-of-the-art programs and resources can develop much more polished graphics, logos, and branding. These are resources not available to you if you chose not to work with a professional designer. The result is a much better visual representation of your business than if you were to simply throw something together using ClipArt in Word.

That’s what a designer has been professionally trained to do – create quality graphics and materials that get you recognized. Good designers are good communicators who are able to convey your business’s values and ideas through graphics and images. Good designers get it right the first time, too, so you don’t have to worry about an inferior design or costly revisions during the print and production stages.

If you are thinking about having design work done, get in touch with us at O2 Creative. Our talented, experienced designers are happy to work with you through every stage of the design process. We’ll help you efficiently create designs that make you look more professional, communicate your value, and gain you recognition in your market.

Click here to read about Digital Media vs Print Media

Contact O2 Creative today at 970-726-8021 or at [email protected]

Check out Christine Parizo’s article here for more info.

Click here for our next blog post – Pug Life!

O2 on the Longboard

The Fraser Valley is for boarders.

Obviously, in the winter, there are multitudes of snowboarders up here, sure. (Skiers, too!) But summertime boarding in the valley usually refers to another increasingly popular sport, and one of O2 Creative’s favorite pastimes: longboarding.

Longboards are similar to skateboards, but only slightly so. For one thing, longboards tend to be…well, longer. This longer design means they’re better suited for coasting long distances. Different wheel and truck designs also allow longboards to turn more easily. Besides that, there’s almost no end to all the shapes and sizes in which longboards are offered.

Longboarding is more akin to surfing than skateboarding. Longboarding was actually invented by surfers, and the sport has even been described as “surfing on concrete.” We think this is a reasonable description, although it may not entirely do the sport justice. The high-speed thrill of cruising effortlessly through the area’s forests, meadows, and parks – it’s just tough to put all that excitement into words.

Grand County is quite the venue for longboarding as well. The county boasts plenty of paved paths perfect for a good longboard cruise, the most popular of which being the Fraser River Trail. This trail meanders along the river at a gradual, steady downhill slope, which is perfect for maintaining speed on a longboard for miles at a time.

In fact, the Fraser River Trail’s change in elevation allows boarders to roll without stopping from the Winter Park Resort all the way down into Fraser…and right up to O2 Creative’s office!

When we’re not hard at work in the office, we’re often on our longboards speeding down one of the area’s many great trails. We’re forever grateful that Colorado’s Favorite Playground affords us so many longboarding opportunities, and also thankful that many of our clients dig the longboards, too.

So if you happen to cruise on by our office one day, feel free to stop and say what’s up to a few of the fellow longboarders in town.

Shout out to our friends at the Fraser Longboard Alliance. Check them out on Facebook for sweet videos, photos, and other cool longboarding info.

Click here for our next blog post – the benefits of a good graphic designer! 

O2 Culture – an introduction

At O2 Creative, we’re all about the most innovative ideas in marketing and design. We take our jobs very seriously, and strive for professional excellence. We work hard.

With that said – we play hard, too. We get to work and live in Grand County, Colorado, and it is an absolute privilege to call Colorado’s Favorite Playground our home. We are afforded so many amazing adventures – hiking, biking, fishing, camping, rafting, and long boarding, just to name a few. We try to take advantage of, and draw creative inspiration from, all the unique opportunities that Grand County has to offer.

We’d like to announce an expansion of the creative direction for our blog. We’ll still write posts offering our own unique insight on important marketing and design topics, but we’d also like to occasionally share stories about our own personal interests, giving our readers a taste of what we call “O2 Culture.”

To start things off, we’d like to share one cool element of O2 personality – we’re avid fly fishermen. As anglers, enthusiasts, and ambassadors of Grand County, we want to share a little known fact:

Grand County fly-fishing sucks.

Don’t come here expecting to catch lots of beautiful wild trout. Any rumors you might have heard just aren’t true.

We don’t have many meandering miles of secluded mountain streams, full of fat feisty cutthroats and brook trout. These fish are not outrageously fun to catch on a 3-weight rod, so don’t even bother.

Nor do we have countless alpine lakes hidden away in the higher reaches of the county, along the Continental Divide and in Rocky Mountain National Park. These lakes are not full of eager trout ready to chomp down the flies of the few anglers who are crazy enough to brave the rugged terrain.

We don’t even have a big river, like the Colorado – biggest in the American Southwest. Fly fishermen have no chance of landing dozens of brown trout all on dry flies in a single afternoon, nor does anyone ever hook into the Colorado’s elusive trophy-size rainbows. Those are all entirely…well, fish stories. Don’t be fooled.

Even if there were any fish to catch, it’s not like the scenery alone make the trip worthwhile. The lakes and streams and meadows and snow-capped peaks are not, in fact, breathtakingly gorgeous in their own right. So don’t come here expecting awesome Rocky Mountain landscapes, because this area couldn’t possibly impress anyone. Not you. not even your dog.

So, yeah, you heard it here. Don’t show up to the awesome trout waters in Colorado’s Favorite Playground expecting to have an epic day of fly-fishing. It couldn’t possibly actually happen. Just keep fishing somewhere else.

Click here for our next blog post – O2 on the Longboard!

Web design

When should your business redesign its website?

That can depend on several things. Does your current site look contemporary and professional? Is it intuitive and simple for visitors to navigate? Is your website search engine optimized? Does every page on your site still work? Does your business have the ability to update or change its own website?

There are plenty of do-it-yourself website templates. All too often, though, they are cheaply designed, and totally look that way too. Website templates are intended for amateur bloggers. If you want your business’s website to look professional, then it should be designed by professionals.

Website design and technology is changing constantly, so if you haven’t done much with your business’s website lately, it’s probably already dated. Graphics and images that looked good years ago probably just aren’t as sharp by today’s standards. A site that looks obsolete or cheap can make your customers think the same of your business.

Many websites – especially dated ones – become increasingly difficult to navigate. The behind-the-scenes coding and structure of a site designed years ago may not display correctly in modern browsers and on mobile devices. If your website isn’t optimized for today’s Internet, then customers may think your entire business is not up-to-date. Customers may even become frustrated while trying to navigate your page and simply go to someone else’s site instead.

Many older sites do nothing for modern search engine optimization (SEO). This means they don’t have the right content, or coding and site architecture, to make it easy for search engines to find and list your site among search results. A professionally designed website will keep you optimized for search engines. This means your website, and not someone else’s, will appear at the top of a Google, Yahoo, Bing, or other search page when your customers look for you.

Optimizing your website for social media can go a long way as well. Linking your website to and from your Facebook, Twitter, and other social media pages can increase traffic for your website and bolster your business’s overall online presence.

Perhaps your website is difficult to update or change. Old websites can be clunky and tough to work with. Maybe your business doesn’t even have control over its own website, instead having to contact your web designer about every little change. New website designs can be very user-friendly, giving your business the option to easily access its own site and update or revise without having to wait for someone else to do it.

What if your website has pages that don’t work? Those broken links to the “page not found?” Worse, what if your website has been hacked, and displays someone else’s unsavory content, or doesn’t even work right? Designing a new site can clean up those messes, and also prevent them from happening again.

(Some of O2 Creative’s web design for one of our favorite clients, The Foundry. Click HERE to see more!)

All things considered, there are plenty of reasons to consult a professional web designer about creating a new website, or overhauling your old one. At O2 Creative we can create the freshest websites that utilize the latest technology. Our websites are professional quality, secure, intuitive to use and navigate, search engine optimized, and easy for your business to control and update.

To get the most out of a new or improved website for your business, consult the friendly web design professionals at O2 Creative today.

Click here for additional reading. Also, Credit Gregory Kogan for the sweet cartoon!

Click here to read our next blog post – an intro to O2 culture!