You don’t know where your next job will come from and while you should always strive to gain new clients the ones you have are a potential goldmine of repeat sales.  But, you need to remind them that you appreciate their business and that you would like to do even more with them.

Traditionally this has been accomplished through old fashioned phone calls or printed mailers.  But these forms of communication have high costs both financially and in the amount of time they take - time that could be better spent on your business.  Mailers are expensive to print and we all know they end up in the rubbish bin.  You may as well save time and just poor your money into your own bin.

Ringing your clients is great, you cannot get any more personal than that.  But think about it.  Do you really ring them?  How often?  How many of them? I bet you don’t ring them all.  And what are those calls costing you in time?  Even if you have only have 100 clients in your database and you take the time to ring 5 a day, which will take about an hour, that equates to 12.5% of your work time per month on the phone!

In this current economic climate it is essential to market to your clients but you have to be sure you are not wasting  time and more importantly, money.  So what is the answer? Read more »

I’m not a huge fan of golf, but I do love flash and I do love seeing flash being put to great use.

The World Golf Tour experience allows golf enthusiasts to play the world’s most challenging and exclusive courses with HD graphics on a PC or Mac platform for free. WGT’s online community allows friends, families and golf fans to play a round of golf simultaneously, competing in tournaments for prizes, sharing scores, testing out the newest equipment and reading the latest news in the golfing world.

Go for a round here.

Martian Design & Interactive now offer a fantastic system for running email marketing campaigns!

it’s really simple to use. We just design you an email template, integrate it into our email marketing platform. You provide us names and email addresses of your customers and we deliver your marketing messages via email to them.

After the campaign has run you can log in to our system and and see stats for how many people opened your email, how many of those clicked on a link, how many unsubscribed etc etc. Its a HUGELY powerful and cost effective form of marketing with truly trackable results.

If you have a web site already then we can supply you with some code so that you can add a “subscribe to our newsletter” form directly onto your site … or if you don’t have a web site as yet then we can certainly build a brilliant one for you.

Next time you are thinking about a marketing campaign then get in touch and we’ll work some email marketing magic for you.

The Carver One is the incredible, 3 wheeled wonder that steers like a car but corners like a motorbike. It’s insane and it’s also no secret that we quite like it. We have a nicely rendered photoshop version of our ideal Carver One in all its metallic green goodness as a constant reminder of how much closer the real thing is getting.

Peter James is the chap that manages Carver New Zealand and Australia and fortunately for us he is local .. which means he pops over from time to time and enlists our help in any design work he may need and takes us for the occasional fly/ride/drive in the Carver.

We created a new site for Peter a few months ago, www.carverexperience.co.nz to help him get the word out on some of the great tourist packages that he is offering as well as promoting the Carver in general. We decided that it would be a good idea to try and give people a bit of a feel as to what its like piloting the Carver so we created a Flash application that lets people get a feel for how it behaves when you go around corners.

We pieced together the interior cockpit, created the ’tilt indicators’, steering wheel etc and with some photos from Peter’s travels in the background and some actionscript to tie everything together we had a fun little simulator. Click here to see what its like from inside the Carver.

We also built a page to show some promotional videos as well as a bookings page where you can book and pay for your experience online. So what are you waiting for? Go and experience the Carver One!

About a year ago, 3 mates launched an innovative concept for a ‘world first’ business idea which aimed to reward Kiwi’s for interacting with New Zealand’s best brands. The web site was www.mintshot.co.nz and it got off to a rather explosive start! (watch the video here http://www.mintshot.co.nz/about-us).

Recently Mintshot were looking to make some signifcant changes to their site and enlisted the help of RND Group to develop the systems and programming as well as ourselves, Martian Design & Interactive, to put the creative together and build the front end.

Nick and the team from Mintshot had a pretty clear vision for what they wanted to achieve with their new site. Build the Mint Shop, increase the value of the Mint dollar, introduce new games and much much more … so after an initial meeting we got to work putting the wireframes together.

The whole process spanned about 3 to 4 months and during that time we were responsible for the look and feel of the majority if the website, creating the html for the site as well as creating all the flash based components and user interaction.

One of the really interesting parts of this project was putting together Mintshot’s new Instant Win game. The concept is quite simple, choose a point on a map where the prize is hiding and if you click on it, you win it. Again we developed all the imagery, built the flash game and worked closely with RND Group to hook the game into the all knowing brain that manages the Instant Win system. Lots of fun and since going live that game has generated massive interest.

The Mintshot redesign was a great project to be involved with and we’re certainly looking forward to working with Nick and team in the future … perhaps for Mintshot version 3 ;)

As a side note, the three parties involved in this project were all located in different cities. Mintshot in Auckland, RND Group in Wellington and ourselves in Tauranga. We kept a tight schedule of conference call style meetings using Skype as well as using some great web based tools which gave us visibility over the entire project … Basecamp for project management, Unfuddle for bug tracking and Harvest for time tracking. These tools are very affordable and really make it easy to keep on top of projects. With a good broadband connection, the right tools and lots of coffee, distance need not be a hurdle anymore.

Today one of our favourite web services, Ponoko, has just launched an amazing new tool called Photomake . This simplifies the process for people to design and make great stuff without having to use any scary design software.

How it works is you take a nice big piece of paper and black felt pen … then simply draw your design. Once you have finished you take a photo of your design and upload it to Ponoko. Easy as that!

Ponoko has a really clever system which will take your photo and make a trace of it .. much like Live Trace does in Adobe Illustrator. After the photo has been traced (which you can see in realtime) you can choose your materials and get a price to make the product instantly. All without having to learn design software.

Needless to say that this is another huge innovation from Ponoko and if you have always wanted to make cool stuff then now is definitely the time to have a go with Ponoko.

What better way to spend a rainy Friday afternoon than to update the good-old Martian portfolio? Martian has had a massive increase in the amount of illustration work requested over the past few months so it was about time to toss them up into the site.

It seems people are starting to realise the value of illustrations as a marketing tool. Incorporated into your logo or marketing material illustrations make your business stand out in a crowd. They are an attractive and practical way to convey concepts and emotions to your clients. And of course they are fun to draw so bring them on!! :)

We have been tackling everything from halloween masks to mascots, even a happy laundry bag!

All the illustrations have been drawn in Adobe Illustrator, a great way to create clean vector graphics that are easy to reproduce. The illustrations are all suitable for the web, print, sign writing and screen printing - making them versatile and hassle free for our clients.

Check out our illustration portfolio or contact Martian about getting an illustrative solution for your own business.

For some time now I’ve been looking for a nice way to render 3D objects in flash so that a viewer can rotate the object and get a real feel for it.

There are a few solutions but none of them really created the high quality look that I was after so the option I have chosen is somewhat of a cheat in that it doesn’t create a true 3D object. It does however give a really nice result and with some tweaking to improve download times might just be a winner (for my needs at least).

Read more »

Tony recently decided that a bit of a party was long overdue. A themed party of course. Pirates.

Now I love pirates as much as the next guy but my favourite pirate of all time would have to be ‘Pirate Steve’ from the Dodgeball movie … who couldn’t love this guy?!

The problem however was where to obtain a Pirate Steve t-shirt. The solution … make our own and buy it direct from cafepress. Of course, you can buy it direct from cafepress too. If you would like the authentic Pirate Steve shirt then search for the one labeled ‘Pirate Steve’ as it also has his team number on the back.

As a follow up to our very successful Scrubs ‘Hooch is Crazy’ T-Shirt we have just released ‘Jzilbek’.

For those Scrubs followers in the know this tee needs no explanation.

You can get one of these great Tees direct from Cafe-press.