Sales Graphics Blog

Three Sales Graphics clients won top ten spots in Adweek’s most recent annual Hot List, with Food Network Magazine taking the cake. As one of 2011′s hottest magazine brands, Food Network approached Sales Graphics to create a high energy video that shows off the consistency of Food Network’s image across platforms.

In the same way that we bring together creative from other clients like Disney, we gathered the best of Food Network’s glossy pages with the most compelling from the Food Network website and added life to static creative with professional animations. From there we weaved in some programming highlights from Food Network’s television channel.

The result achieved Food Network’s desire to showcase everything that makes the brand so satisfying across platforms. We congratulate them for their well deserved place in the rankings and wish nothing but the best for the Food Network in the second half of the year.

Other Magazines in the Top 10 Who Use Sales Graphics For Presentation Software and Design

• Vanity Fair – Read about an iPad presentation we created for them.
• Elle Decor – Elle Decor uses our presentation software to manage a compelling library of images, videos and slides. Presenters can grab the creative they see fit and add it to any presentation to create a customized experience for each of their advertisers. They also take advantage of our web presentation feature built specifically for large companies.

Thank you to the Fitting Group, who is featuring our CustomShow presentation software in Challenger Brand News this week. We are indeed going up against Goliath in the form of Microsoft PowerPoint. The good news is that no one loves PowerPoint, everyone simply tolerates it.

As mentioned in the article, we’ve been able to convince major brands to switch to CustomShow. Our customers include “DIRECTV, CNN, Bravo, The New Yorker, A&E, ELLE, The Wall Street Journal and Dior. And that’s just the short list.”

Here’s what Challenger Brand News has to say about CustomShow:

Beyond being dazzling, CustomShow sports a number of boons. On the one hand, it allows control over the information being presented in a way that ensures that the company’s brand guidelines are consistent. But on the other, it allows quick and easy customization of presentations to permit flexibility.

More than anything, CustomShow is a presentation program for a world with a short attention span and high visual expectations.

And they don’t even mention our new Web meeting capability, which plays high-definition video smoothly. You can find the entire Challenger Brand article here.

PC America, creator of that software for restaurants and stores, released an online demo for their newest product, Cash Register Express. Working for the second time with Sales Graphics’ DesignStudio, PC America created an online demo that walks store owners through all the benefits and features of their great new computerized management system. With great graphics, music and footage of the system in use, the online demo really gets the point across that Point-of-Sales systems can make all the difference for retail. And it even gets the point across in three languages – English, Spanish and French. Built in Flash and fully interactive, PC America’s online demo for Cash Register Express makes their website a real point of sale for PC America!

Adobe announced today the public release of their new application development platform, AIR. AIR lets developers bridge the gap between online applications and offline applications, letting users work seamlessly with data and content whether they’re connected to the Internet or not. The New York Times also reported on Adobe’s announcement today (“Adobe Blurs the Line Between PC and Web“). Here at Sales Graphics, we’re excited about the opportunities this creates for CustomShow and its users and part of our development plan for 2008 is to incorporate this type of technology into future releases of CustomShow. Several big companies have already dabbled in providing applications using the AIR application, and with the official public release of the software more companies will likely be joining in as well. And as an example of how committed Adobe is to the AIR platform, Adobe recently named Kevin Lynch, the initial instigator behind the AIR platform, as Adobe’s Chief Technology Office. So Adobe is clearly committed to making AIR, FLEX and Flash its primary development objective going forward. And we’re excited to be a part of that development effort.

Adobe’s AIR Technology, one of the exciting new technologies that we’ve been incorporating into our CustomShow development plans, was chosen by Technology Review as one of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2008 (“TR10:10 Emerging Technologies 2008“). Although CustomShow has been running on Adobe technology for years and we’ve been excited about AIR since it was announced, it’s good to see that other people are starting to recognize the amazing potential of offline/online multimedia applications. As we continue to develop and expand CustomShow to incorporate new technologies like AIR, the more excited we get about the new features and functionality that we’ll be able to offer our clients.

Building on our addition of Henry as Director of Engineering, Greg Gordon today joined Sales Graphics as Senior Software Engineer. Focusing on the new technologies that will help expand CustomShow’s features and functionality and extend its reach across the Internet, Greg is already hard at work learning what our users are doing today and what they’ll need to do tomorrow. With broad experience in software development, most recently in mobile application, Greg brings a strong focus on the users’ experience to the development team. 

2008 is going to be a big year for Sales Graphics and CustomShow, and that will be in no small part because of the work that Henry Nissenbaum will be doing for us. Today is his first day as Sales Graphics’ new Director of Engineering.

Having just spent the day in Chicago going to AdobeMax 2007, the excitement here over the new possibilities and opportunities that Adobe’s new technologies provide is overwhelming. Sales Graphics has been one of Adobe’s biggest supporters for over a decade, having built CustomShow on Adobe’s (formerly Macromedia’s) Director Platform. Now, after almost a decade and a thousand pages of code, we’re looking towards making fundamental changes in CustomShow’s core technologies and Adobe’s Flash, Flex and AIR are being released at just the right time. As we continue to develop CustomShow and begin to incorporate all of these new technologies, we expect 2008 to be a year of big and exciting changes for CustomShow and Sales Graphics!