As always, please check back with us frequently to see what new stuff we are doing and to see when we finally release our full vector sets and vector packs.

If we can get enough downloads, we will start doing more giveaways and even more cool stuff. So please send the link to all of your friends. Tweet it, post it on facebook, blog about it, text message about it to help get the word out! We might even pick out 1 person that downloaded it to give away all of our vector packs before we even release them to the public!!

If you like what we have here, but you want something custom, please contact us immediately and we will get you set up with a one of a kind illustration to fit your needs. We can also provide custom screen printing as well, so don’t hesitate and get behind the competition.

Having watched the London riots rage on now for multiple days through news sources and through internet user media (Youtube videos, other blog posts, etc) I hope that everyone stays safe first and foremost. Whatever the cause behind the rioting, hurting or killing other people is definitely not any answer. From what I understand, these riots initially started from a report of someone getting killed by the police, but has generally devolved into something more vague and seemingly less meaningless at first glance. The latest reports are that young people are getting more involved, not because of an untimely death, but because of our frustration with our economic position and our role in it.

We keep seeing media villianize these rioters because a large group of them are just taking advantage of the situation to grab electronics and make a mess. While these people are unfortunately bringing down the meaning of the rest of the group, it is still very much there.

Young people are the majority of the rioters out on the streets and they do have a cause behind them. As a young adult I can tell you that the job market is terrible out there. Between talking to friends, and getting resumes I can clearly see our generation is really feeling the brunt of our economic situation. We are just getting out of college, and trying to start our lives and we are frequently having to battle up hill to even get a job to start making payments for our education that helped lead us into this. While I am in the US, and we have been dealing with extraordinary college costs for as long as we can remember, our generation across the pond have not. For myself, I have to deal with college costs at around $8,000 a semester. Those costs are forcing us into a job market that requires a secondary education to get a job, with incredible amounts of debt (around $100,000), and absolutely no job market to begin with.

I think we are now beginning an era that will see high school students skipping college and going into the job force immediately so they can start receiving pay raises to get up to a livable wage. You are going to start seeing kids living at home much longer than ever before. You are going to start seeing a generation that admittedly is babied already, turn into bigger babies. All of this doesn’t help any of us. Its that type of short sighted style of building and living that has partially caused these riots and have caused a generation to finally rage up and force others to look at us and our situation.

We keep getting told that we are too young to know anything, we shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and that previous generations have had it worse. We are being held back from making decisions and at the same time blamed for these screw ups. I can certainly understand our elder’s worries and their thought processes, but our frustration has been bottling up in us for years because of this exact thing. What you see in London is it all coming to a head and it won’t get better until the system starts getting fixed.

Since I am in the US, I can tell you that our recent credit downgrade is frustrating from my standpoint. Seeing 2 political parties battle over something as silly as wanting to look like the tougher half has cost our country its credit rating and potentially caused more economic strife around the world. Coming up through school, it was always fairly apparent to my friends and I, that our current political system was going to disintegrate into this, but we didn’t think it would happen so soon.

Again, I hope that the rioters that are just looting and causing damage get caught. I hope that people stay safe and that buildings stop being destroyed. We need to revolt, but not in such a childish and immature way.

This is a call to arms for my fellow designers, geeks and artists! We need to rise up, but lets do so in a civilized, organized fashion. Let us use what people think has been our downfall, technology and art, to come together and share our story with the world. Let us make noise, but let us do it in a way that gets us into debates with our elders, our peers. We shall tweet, we shall facebook…. we shall announce our displeasure with our political systems, not our political parties! So bring out your pencils, bring out your tablets, your computers, your keyboards and smartphones and lets get to work!!

Why is this such a shock to clients in this age? I have some theories behind this….

1) Most designers are really just freelancers. Whether they are unemployed or working full time, they don’t really see themselves as making this into a full time business. It just isnt worth their time to drive to a client only to possibly get shot down later.
2) Laziness – I will be upfront and say that artsy people are kinda flaky naturally. We get sidetracked on other things easily and we tend to be lazy about things we don’t want to do. This is really the case in younger designers that are fresh from college. They tend to be the ones that think they are special from other designers and will get work without putting in work
3) Just bad customer service – Unfortunately, most designers don’t have to go through a customer service course in school. They don’t understand that taking a little time out of their day to meet with a new client can help ease the client’s fears as well as help make the sale. The same thing is done with the phone as well, and most contact is done strictly through email.

Now, we offer it for most of our clients for a few main reasons…

1) We understand that you don’t know us. At the same time, we don’t really know you either. This gives us a chance to really sit down and determine if you are the type of client we want to work with or not.
2) We also get a chance to ask more questions and get a better feel for what you want out of your final project.
3) Its just good customer service. Forget the fact that it helps us all out and allows us to do our job faster and better. Its just something that should be done, especially when dealing with a new client or when dealing with a larger project (anything over $500 is a large project to a client…. thats a lot of bread to come up with).

This is one of those basic things that as a client or a designer, you can really see how professional your other half is. If they don’t want to meet up and communicate, then they won’t want to when you are in the middle of the project either. Its the quickest way to botch a project and a relationship and its a good indicator on who you should work with.

Today’s post is going to talk a little bit about some stuff we are working on without giving too much away….

We are in the process of doing some research and market analysis to launch some new products. Specifics are still on the drawing board, but I can tell everyone that it will involve some downloadable items, templates, giveaways, and apparel. We are going to launch all of this cool stuff under our brand called “Mercury Labs”

We do have some apparel for sale in our store section (which will soon go through a MAJOR overhaul), so check that all out and maybe buy a shirt or 2. We are giving away some secret freebies to a select few people that buy stuff in our store.

One thing that we keep getting asked about is our current web design. Unfortunately, this was just a temporary site while we work on our true site and test out some interesting new features. We are looking at possibly having a live chat function in the near future if the need is there. We also plan on fully incorporating our brand into the website as well as revamping our online store with the new products and some other cool stuff.

Now, I really shouldnt be talking about this, but we are trying to figure out the logistics on doing a large marketing, music and art conference. Since it is in the dead of summer here in Maryland, it probably won’t happen until sometime next year and at this point it is only a thought with some superficial planning put in. But, given the networking events we have been to as well as the conferences we have attended over the years, they all end up being boring and not very helpful. So our thought was to make it a fun, festival atmosphere without the cheap irrelevant sponsorships. Something that both designers and business owners can come to and understand more about our industry and why what we do is important.

We do a lot of sponsorships along the year, but this latest one has me the most excited. As a big fan of the fight game, MMA and boxing, we are always going to events and working with fighters on their images. The official MMA coach of Mercury Studios, John “Bones” Shaddock is set to fight Dan “The Beast” Severn sometime in the spring of 2012. We definitely suggest that you go to his website or facebook and give him a little motivation during his training camp.

Last, we are going to have Amanda do some blog postings here. They will be about a lot of different things. From cool gadgets we think are useful, to relevant posts about ways you can be more efficient. She is a super talented writer that deals with a side of the business that many designers forget about and we all think her posts can help everyone out. So look for her stuff soon and don’t hesitate to send her an email with some topics you want discussed.

Between the panel’s experience in design and marketing, we will be able to answer pretty much any question thrown at us. However, we are limited to 2 hours to answer the questions, so get on their facebook page, like them and start asking away! We’ll be on tomorrow to start answering them and assisting you lovely people.

Until then, if you don’t want the hassle of trying to do everything yourself, contact us for a quote today. We’ll get you rocking and rolling while you work.

Well we have some relatively big news here at Mercury Studios…… we will be creating and self-releasing our very own mobile phone game!!!! Now the post title is just the codename of our game and not the full title (that won’t be released until much much later).

Its something that I have always wanted to do and we just finally decided to go whole hog into it and take it out of a planning phase and really get more into the creation of it. Over the next few months we will be releasing little tid-bits about the game, the visuals, the audio (that’s right, custom soundtrack for this bad boy) and everything else until we are ready to release it out to the public. Now this will be on both the Apple and Android marketplaces, so no worries on whatever phone you have.

Having spent some time in the video game industry, I know this sounds like a fun and easy project, but it can quickly turn into a nightmare that we are just happy to get off our laps. However, I am really happy with our team, our ideas, and our ability to keep things light a crazy as usual. The visuals are really my baby and I am really excited about the art direction we are taking on with this game.

There are a few reasons that we are doing this game during the busiest time in our history. For one, we want to be able to offer app creation as a new service and I want to make sure that we can do it well at our craziest. Secondly, I want to work out the kinks in our workflow…. there are some unique obstacles that we have to face to create something like this and its important that we hurdle them now and not later. Lastly, its going to be amazing and if anyone has met me, you know I won’t do it unless its amazing!!

Now, we are still very much in the early stages of the game design so there isn’t much to release currently except a few dirty sketches. As always, I hope that you guys keep visiting our site for more information and take the time out to spread the word about us and our game.

First, I need to outline where we are as a business for you to really get the grasp of how much we have grown in the 2 years we have been open for business. Right now we are growing at a really good clip and exceeding a lot of expectations. I absolutely LOVE our team of people, our clients and we have been working 16 hour days for them. We have been very lucky in some aspects but have worked very very hard for our growth here at Mercury Studios. Between choosing our clients carefully, offering top notch customer service as well as the best design and printing around we have been able to invest more into our business and back into our clients.

I started this company because I was tired of every company I had worked for. There were a lot of great people along the way and some really great organizations as well, but they all had the same mindset… They would push people out of the way to get a dollar and most of the time it was at the expense of the employees and the clients. It led to a business that would pull in more than you could imagine in profit, which is what we all want, but a ton of turnover on employees and clients that came to expect mediocrity. I personally got tired of the politics of just “shutting my mouth and doing my job” and not being able to care more about the work I literally “churned out”. So I decided it was time to take my expertise as a designer, printer and business man and open up my own firm so I could do it better.

To be honest, it was difficult at first. Having quite literally just quit my job, I didn’t really have a base of clients that I could hit up for work and I didn’t think it was right to steal them away from my old company. I hit the networking market, but nothing really panned out from that. If you go to networking meetings, they can be really great for business, but in this economy you find it is a bunch of “entrepreneurs” that don’t want to work hard for themselves, much less to help your business any.

Through offering great work at great prices and working 24/7, I was able to get a strong base of clients that knew I was going to take care of them better than anyone else could. I found people that were polite, hard working, wanted to grow their businesses, and appreciated good work. Instead of working for the quick buck, I was able to grow with people and invest into my business so I could add services that people needed.

From there, we added a full screen printing shop offering the same as our design business…. Great prices with award winning quality. Since we were able to take a lot of our clients from an idea through having a fully stocked clothing line or company apparel, we got a ton of work and a ton of new clients from word of mouth. It was time to take it to the next level a few months later and we added the web design portion of the business. Now we could take our clients from just an idea into the global-online market as well as the local markets with our services and work again increased. We were able to work with clients like Budweiser, local entertainer Mickey Cucchiella and Bowie State University.

Just recently it was time to invest more into our business and into what our clients wanted…. MORE PRINTING. We now offer full paper printing (ie: business cards, flyers, brochures, etc) as well as signage (ie: banners, yard signs, vehicle lettering, etc). People have come to know us as a company that cares, and a company that can really get behind you to make you successful, so we felt it was necessary to have us be a 1 stop shop so you don’t have to go anywhere else.

We rely on word of mouth about our hard work ethic and our customer service to really grow us. Just a reminder to all businesses…. All of the marketing in the world can’t make a bad company successful. Once a customers realizes that a company is mediocre, they don’t tend to stick around for very long.

I hope that everyone that read this post can understand what has set us apart and made us as successful as we are today…. hard work. We are still growing and we have a lot left that I still want to do for this business (some big announcements are coming soon) and I hope that you all stick around with us and we all grow together.

I thought it was time to add a blog to our site. We’ve had the ability the entire time, but I didn’t want to take the time away from our clients and their projects. Now, we are getting asked more about our business all the time and more about what we do on a day to day basis

Anyway…. We will be doing some posts some of the time and maybe some vlogs some of the time. I want to make this blog not just the typical design and print firm blog where we regurgitate fluff from other sites and just offer some simple stuff that really directs you back to our services. I don’t think that is interesting or fair to people, so we won’t really be doing that. If there is truly something that I think should be shared, and I do, then I will happily post an entry about it and offer some serious discussions about it.

I want to make this blog more about what we do and a bit about how we do it. Give you a little insight on the intense work we do here as well as the general thoughts from my mind. I hope that designers and business owners stop by here a lot to check out what we are doing next and to get an interesting read to go along with the visuals.

Ok, I guess this is enough babbling for now.
Matt