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 Design Aid...
...is a unique UK registered charity dedicated to supporting charitable projects with professional graphic design, DTP and related services.
Providing professional creative solutions and design for Charity. As part of the Charity Sector Design Aid's support brings a huge benefits. As a member of, (and service provider for) the charitable community, Design Aid is best positioned to provide the ultimate design service to the Charity Sector. Design Aid's involvement in your charitable project can be anything from a complete creative service, (from design through to production) to support with a simple consultation/help & advice on how to best progress your projects' communication, brand and presence. Brand Values
Our strength lies in our ability to assess the Brand Values of a charity and put this into the words and images required to communicate and build relationships with its target audience. From here we are able to choose the right media and message that best delivers those brand values. We work with your existing brand or create a new brand that best presents these values to its beneficiaries, supporters, or the public. We work closely with you to provide the tools and framework required to deliver your own brand values. Portfolio
Our website will be regularly updated with news and case studies of Design Aid's work for you to view and download. Overview
Design Aid has provided some very exciting and interesting creative solutions. As well as Annual Reports, leaflets, flyers, posters, websites, brochures, newsletters, stationary, business cards, etc. we have been working on DVD and music CD covers for various community projects as well as some fantastic exhibition banner & pop-up stands. Over the years Design Aid has provided services to many satisfied beneficiaries across the world. Any distance between us and a beneficiary has yet to cause a problem. We have developed an excellent working practice that takes full advantage of email, telephone and postal services. Our working methodology is simple...
we combine our professional creative skills and our extensive broader knowledge of charity sector with your specific knowledge of your organisations work. The working practice of developing most creative solutions for a project is something like this: - We take a brief and ask a few questions to establish your target audience, what you need the publications/media to achieve, etc. Together we establish what is needed, (often taking into consideration the budget available). We then establish the Design Aid resources to be utilised in the project and provide an estimate for the required services.
- We will produce a first proof! This can be almost the finished design, or quite wide of the mark. The key thing is to get something to you that you can pass comment on and make amendments to. This will get everyone involved in dialogue and is vital to generating the best creative solution for a project. (We have found many find it difficult to describe what they require, it can be easier to look at something and pass comment to advance a creative project).
- Another two or three proofs with your input, (comments and amends) all the way gives us a publication that has combined our creative and design skills with your knowledge of your organisations specific objectives.
- Once we are all happy with the design, layout and content of the work we can organise print and delivery.
We continue to find ways of getting the most out of our clients budgets producing Annual Reports that double as presentation folders, compliment slips that fold up to work as a business card etc. we often find ways to design one marketing tool in such a way that it can deliver professional communications on more than one level. Design Aid & the Internet
Web 2.0 is the latest buzz word in web design and for a change it is very relevant to charitable organisations as its all about communities and community building. Defining Web 2.0 - In alluding to the version-numbers that commonly designate software upgrades, the phrase "Web 2.0" hints at an improved form of the World Wide Web. Technologies such as weblogs (blogs), social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, web application programming interfaces (APIs), and online web services such as eBay and Gmail provide enhancements over read-only websites. Stephen Fry (actor, author, and broadcaster) describes Web 2.0 as "an idea in people's heads rather than a reality. It’s actually an idea that the reciprocity between the user and the provider is what's emphasized. In other words, genuine interactivity if you like, simply because people can upload as well as download". Design Aid continues to develop community building and Web 2.0 websites that utilise and even expand on the many exiting features of our open source CMS installs and in particular we have adopted and customised many of the fantastic functions available for our clients CMS websites. Design Aid can also provide all your domain name and web hosting solutions.
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What we do 
Design Aid takes the creation of community websites to the next level. Our powerful and versatile CMS and Web 2.0 functions are integrated with our custom modules and plug-ins to create a site that is content managed not only by administrators but at many different levels by your community, for your community! Sites like this one!
