Do You Create Visual Images On Your Computer? Here is a Fabulous Gift From Luc Bertrand, CBA.

Luc Bertrand, CBA, of Waw Balloons in Vichte, Belgium, recently taught a class at the World Balloon Convention —"Creating Magic on Paper." In this class, Luc showed delegates how to create realistic-looking visualisations of designs and decor to make stunning presentations and selling so much easier! Below is a great example of an arch Luc designed that could be easily presented to a client showing them exactly what they are getting. As Luc says, "Words can describe, but images sell. Research shows that the human brain is able to process a visual image up to 60,000 times faster than the same information in text form."

There are many ways to create your visual images. Luc uses MacDraft PE (personal edition), others use Publisher, and there are many other apps and programs that can be used. I simply use shapes in Word or Pages to create my designs. Below is an extract from a post that I wrote in 2012 - "As a Balloon Artist, how can we find our Inspiration".

Designing 

We still don’t need to touch a balloon at this stage. I suppose it really depends on what you plan on making. Some designers sketch out their designs first. Others reach for their keyboards! Hopefully, if you are reading this you have access to either a PC or Mac, and therefore you should have either WORD or PAGES. Either one of these programs will give you the ability to start designing. Just use the shapes to create your balloon shapes. To find the shapes in WORD, click on VIEW and then TOOLBOX. When that opens click on DRAWING. This will give you a new toolbar that has everything that you need. Use FILL to colour your shapes. CUT and PASTE to re-create more of the same. "Hey presto," you have a very basic design package. I can assure you I still use it today when I am designing anything from room decor to a centrepiece! "Father Christmas" started life as a computer-generated design. This method saves time and materials and 99% of the time and works out just perfectly when recreated with actual balloons! I am sure there are many clever people out there who know how to work with Coral Draw and other sophisticated design programs. That is my dream one day, but I know that as with anything new it will take a while to work out how to do it, so for now I am keeping to the simple way!

I created this just by simply using round shapes and filling in the colours!

Today's post is not about how to create these super images on our computers, but for those of you who do, here is a fabulous gift from Luc!

Luc has created a fabulous latex colour chart that shows Qualatex^® balloons in a round rather than a balloon shape. This will allow us to create our visual images using the actual balloon colours that we are proposing rather than the nearest colour we can generate on our computers, making our designs even more professional.

Did you notice that Luc's arch design used the Qualatex Chrome balloons?

To make it easy for you to download this chart, I will add it to the files section in both the Qualatex and QBN Facebook Groups. These files will open in either Keynote or PowerPoint. I will also add the file as a PDF.

Only yesterday, I created a visual image of decor that I was proposing for a corporate client. It took me less than 15 minutes to create the image, and I sent it to my customer with a quote. It worked; I got the job! 

I truly hope that Luc teaches his class again. I know for sure that I would definitely love to attend!

For those of you who would like to create visual images for their customers but are not able to create the designs themselves, there are a number of payable options:

Balloon Art Clip Art by Balloon Splendor - these are available on Etsy 
virtualoon.com - this is a membership-based software 

There may be others that I am not aware of. Please let me know if there are so I may add them to the list.


Happy Ballooning!

Sue
www.suebowler.com