The Apttus Commercial Excellence Report (ACE) was based on a commissioned survey centering on the B2B buying and selling experience of 3,000 respondents from the U.S., U.K., and Germany. The resulting data was reviewed, analyzed, and compiled into a report that became the center of an integrated marketing campaign. The contents of the report were the subject of blog posts, thought leadership pieces, social posts, webinars, print collateral, keynote speeches, and other lead generation materials.

NOTE: This sample is an excerpt from Chapter 2, page 25 of the ACE Report.

The Consequences of Poor Customer Experience

No brand is born with an installed base brandishing instant trust. Trusted brands are built over time with consistent reliability and top-notch service, and that means playing it smart.

It cannot be emphasized enough how crucial a B2B prospect’s first impression is in shaping brand impression. Every website visit, email, print collateral, sales call, app, event, or webinar can be a customer’s first time interacting with your company. A bad interaction can drive customers away, cause “lead degeneration,” and contribute to lost revenue opportunities.

The benefits of getting it right or the consequences of getting it wrong provide a stark contrast in business outcomes. If a B2B buyer has a poor experience the first time, two of five (41%) said they would never return to that vendor. More than half (52%) said they would engage infrequently. Combined, more than nine of ten B2B buyers (92%) would undermine a vendor’s revenue opportunities.

Poor first impressions are looked down upon across regions. However, German respondents set the highest standards for their B2B buying experience, with a 50% chance that a buyer never returns to a vendor’s mobile app or website if they had a bad initial experience. The research reveals German B2B buyers having little tolerance for inconvenience, slow access to support, and inaccurate information

U.K buyers are nearly as unforgiving. Two of five (41%) British respondents said they will never return to a vendor after a poor initial buying experience, calling out slow access to information and poor user interfaces (UI) of websites or mobile applications as the main reasons.

The U.S. B2B buyers shared the U.K. respondents’ dislike of poor UI, with about one in three (32%) saying they would walk away from a vendor for good after a subpar first impression.

“Almost everyone will make a good first impression, but
only a few will make a good lasting impression.”
-Sonya Parker, Author

Suppose you make a great first impression. Your reward? How about a 67% increase in customers willing to purchase your offering, regardless of price. In fact, two of three B2B buyers are willing to spend more for a better buying experience, even if it’s not the cheapest option. This is especially true in the United States, where seven of ten respondents (71%) value a better buying experience over a cheaper price tag. The time end effort spent ensuring customers have a good first impression pays dividends.

It’s simple – customers are willing to pay more for a great experience. Overall, two in five buyers are willing to pay as much as 5% more for a product or service if the buying experience is positive, with nearly half (47%) of U.K. buyers expressing this sentiment.

What about 10% more for your product or service? A third of buyers (31%) said they will pay the premium if the experience is right. Another 14% of respondents are willing to pay 15% more. In Germany, where convenience and seamless buying experience are top driving factors in B2B decision making, one in ten are willing to pay 20% more for a better buying experience.

In the digital economy, B2B customers buy an experience, not just a product. Over time, as more services emerge, expect these percentages to increase.

CLIENT: APTTUS
WORK: Analyst Report
SOURCE: HTTPS://APTTUS.COM/ACE/

March 10, 2020 — SAN MATEO, Calif. — Apttus has been named a Leader in the Nucleus Research 2020 CPQ Value Matrix.

For this Value Matrix, Nucleus evaluated CPQ vendors based on their usability and functionality, as well as the value that customers realized from each product’s capabilities. The research is intended to serve as a snapshot of the CPQ technology market, help inform customers about how vendors are delivering value, and take stock of what can be expected in the future based on present investments.

Apttus is recognized as a Leader in the Value Matrix for its Apttus’ Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) suite. Its CPQ distinguishes itself through solution performance by handling large complex quotes at enterprise scales. The pairing of Apttus CPQ with its CLM solution closes the distance between sales and legal teams. The combination enables parallel review and in-document editing features, where the CPQ and order agreements are automatically updated as multiple reviewers reconcile redlines in the contract. Integration of the two solutions leverages customer and sales data to support legal teams in contract oversight and sales teams in generating revenue opportunities, reducing contract cycles, and managing risk.

“Apttus has distinguished itself through solution performance by handling large complex quotes at enterprise scales for nearly all industries, an impressive breadth of functionality,” says Isaac Gould, analyst at Nucleus Research. “Nucleus expects Apttus to continue to grow its market share by attracting new customers from numerous serviced verticals.”

“We’re delighted to be recognized as a CPQ Leader by Nucleus Research. Nucleus highlighting our ability to handle large, enterprise-level complexities across a broad range of industries validates that our roadmap is on the path to success,” says Frank Holland, CEO at Apttus. “It’s a very exciting time for Apttus and we look forward to executing our vision for commercial excellence and providing the best solutions for our customers.”

About Apttus

Apttus is a Silicon Valley-based global provider of a Middle Office platform that allows enterprises to automate and optimize their most critical revenue and commercial relationship management processes. Apttus is powered by the most advanced technologies from Salesforce, Microsoft, and IBM. Analysts rank Apttus as the global gold standard for Quote-to-Cash (QTC) and Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions. Apttus customers include hundreds of the world’s mid-sized organizations and the who’s who of the Global 1000. To lean more, visit Apttus.com or follow us on Twitter @Apttus.

About Nucleus Research

Nucleus Research is a global provider of investigative, case-based technology research and advisory services. We deliver the numbers that drive business decisions. For more information, visit NucleusResearch.com or follow us on Twitter @NucleusResearch.

CLIENT: APTTUS
WORK: PRESS RELEASE
SOURCE: https://apttus.com/press_room/nucleus-research-names-apttus-as-a-leader-in-the-2020-cpq-value-matrix/

We love our kids with all our hearts, but we can all agree that elementary school children aren’t Olympic level athletes. If you’ve ever seen a pee-wee soccer game, you know what I’m talking about. Every player from both sides (including goalies) surround the ball and shuffle it back and forth across the field. It looks like a giant Roomba sweeping a patch of grass.

Do you see that same level of disarray when looking at your revenue stream? Although quotes are generated, contracts are signed, and deals are moving along, it’s likely all your tools, processes, and data points are disparate. The disconnection and shuffling, similar to the children in the pee-wee soccer game, hinder future growth and success. What organizations need is a single data model that houses the most crucial steps in the revenue process – revenue generation and the management of key commercial relationships.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

I saw a living example of the power of a single entity working as one in my daughter’s fourth grade Junior Olympic relay team. These four girls were not the biggest or fastest team on the track nor were they intent on winning. In fact, they were more focused on the boba party scheduled after the event. But the coach (a volunteer parent) did a very smart thing – he drilled them on perfecting the handoff.

In a relay race, you have four bodies in motion, all running at top speed but with the added challenge of handing off a metal baton to the next runner. There are specific rules and techniques to ensure a smooth handoff: your placement in your lane, when you should start running to match speed with the runner behind you, which hand you grab or hand off the baton with, etc. Every individual needs to work together in unison and without hesitation to achieve the optimal outcome – a win.

Identifying the Weakest Link

Any system is only as strong as its weakest link, and no one wants a weak link when revenue is concerned. As an example, say you have multiple data fields of the same type (i.e. an expiration date) across a variety of vendor solutions. Reports could end up with multiple columns, each representing an expiration date pulled from the various source data, so you’ll either play a constant game of data massage and migration or pay for costly one-off solutions to clean up the mess. When you add on the extra workload of calculated fields, APIs, and product catalogs in the tens of thousands, you’ll find yourself bogged down just making sure the data is clean.

Success requires the same attention to detail and clockwork precision in the revenue stream as a winning relay team. When revenue solutions (from quoting and contracting to revenue management) don’t share a data set, you likely create and maintain custom data models for each application. This not only drastically slows down workflow but also leads to costly, time-consuming upgrades.

Without the clean handoff of data through the entire revenue pipeline, you may have issues with:

– Botched quotes
– Missed revenue opportunities
– Overlooked renewals
– Repeated redlining of ambiguous contracts
– Missing or misfiled documents
– Compliance issues

The Power of a Single Data Model

A single data model approach lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO), minimizes implementation time, and simplifies upgrades in the future. Each component of your Quote-to-Cash (QTC) solution, from pricing and quoting to contract management, should work together natively. With all of your processes under one umbrella, data is handed off smoothly all the way down the line. This handoff results in a number of benefits, including faster turnaround time for deals and more concise insight into your pipeline, so you can make better business decisions. The true power of the single data model is its speed and agility.

Winning Together

And as for those four little girls who perfected their handoff technique? As they lined up next to their bigger and faster competition, they stayed focused and made sure they were prepared for that baton. During the race, the other teams lost their leads as handoffs were fumbled, batons were dropped, and communication faltered – one pair literally stood facing each other for a few seconds before finally passing their baton.

The four little girls came from behind, tore across that track, and smoothly passed that baton like it was an extension of their arms. One speedy, agile, unit. They won the gold (and had a HELL of a boba party afterward).

And that’s the personification of the single data model. Each part working together, communicating as one, and interacting fluidly to reach a winning conclusion.

CLIENT: Apttus
WORK: BLOG POST
SOURCE: https://apttus.com/blog/the-art-of-the-handoff-why-your-business-needs-a-single-data-model/

RESPOND SOFTWARE
I didn’t create the animation on this video but helped work on the script and storyboard with the animation studio, and edited together the animatic. I’m pretty pleased with how it simplifies the concept of cybersecurity and how Respond helps cut down on a large chunk of issues with automation and lets the security personnel focus on the important issues.

NIMBLE STUDIO DEMO
A quick 3-minute demo I wrote, directed, and edited. This was a video used on the website, at tradeshows, and as sales material.

EPIC NPC MAN: RATS
I wrote a script for the YouTube channel Viva La Dirt League and it appeared in season three of Epic NPC Man. Poking fun at video game logic, this series is quite popular and this entry was my take on the issue of weird loot drops from the most unlikely of places.

APB RELOADED: WHAT CAN YOU DO? (In 60 Seconds or Less)
This is one of the more popular videos on my personal YouTube channel: Bearded Coffee Monkey. As a way to learn video editing, I started a YouTube channel and post videos there (generally gaming related) and have a ton of fun just entertaining folks.

A baker is done with a cake when he takes it out of the oven and decorates it. Seems pretty straightforward, right? Tasty cake goodness in two simple steps: oven and icing. For many people, the concept of being done in their day-to-day jobs is almost a non-thought. I mean, either the thing is done or it’s not. With animation though, you eventually get to a point where you ask yourself, “Am I done?”. You sit and stare at your screen while your mind races. “Does the face need to compress just a little bit more? Have I really polished that foot roll? Is the arc perfect? What is perfect, anyway? If I pushed that just 3 more frames, would it be funnier?” It’s so easy to dive into the weeds and get stuck, constantly just tweaking and pushing and tweaking. Getting your animation to that “done” state isn’t so simple.

Or is it?

Being “done” means your goal has been achieved. You have a task you need to accomplish (i.e. bake a cake) and the same holds true for animation. Even though it is fun, challenging, and wonderfully creative, you must always remember:

Every Scene Has A Goal

Are you trying to convey an emotion? Highlight an action? Make a transition? Whatever the goal of the shot is, first and foremost, you need to make sure your animation meets the needs of the shot. If you know the goal of the shot, you are that much closer to knowing if you are done. Before the baker starts, he knows what sort of cake he is making: a simple cake, a decorative cake, an extravagant wedding cake. The goal is set and the end result is visualized in his mind.

Identifying your goal and meeting it is especially important if you are working for a studio or work on a time-table. Eventually, your shot needs to move onto the next stage of production (lighting, compositing, editing, etc.) and usually, someone else will determine if you are done or not. As long as you have nailed the goal of the shot, you can feel confident passing it along, even if it isn’t quite as tweaked and perfect as you’d like. After all, animators are notorious for working and re-working and noodling a shot with a seemingly endless series of “final” passes. At some point a supervisor or project coordinator has to wrestle it away, even as the animator follows them down the hallway adjusting splines and tweaking arcs.

“Done” Does Not Always Mean “Success”

Being able to take a list of ingredients and combine them properly into a pleasing final product is an art and takes a certain amount of skill. The baker can mix the ingredients together, bake it all up, add the icing, and he is done: a cake has been made … but it tastes … terrible. It’s the same with animation. You have a goal, you have the tools, and know (technically) how to get from beginning to end, but sometimes the end result just doesn’t seem … “right”.

You might be done because the shot needs to move on down the production pipeline even though you aren’t quite satisfied with it. Sometimes you are done because you have reached your limits as an animator and just can’t achieve the goal you have in your mind. Perhaps your vision exceeds your skill level. The trick is to be done, but not defeated.

Were the goals of the shot clearly defined? Does the shot match what you imagined in your head? Are you overthinking the shot, or adding too much “stuff” that distracts from the essence of the scene? Being able to identify your shortcomings and learn from your mistakes are the hallmarks of an (eventually) great animator. In those cases where it’s just not coming together, you can start over and evaluate your goals and the goals of the shot, or you just move on to the next project and treat it all as a learning experience.

Until you have a good eye for shots you can borrow someone else’s eye (just don’t put it in your pocket and get lint all over it). You can turn to fellow animators, classmates, mentors, supervisors, and people whose opinion you value to help you determine if a shot meets its goals. Over time, with more shots under your belt and with the guiding advice of more experienced animators, you will eventually train your eye and get more comfortable determining yourself if a shot is done to your satisfaction. Someday you might be the one people come to for advice.

The Final 10% Takes 90% Of The Effort

Not all goals are the same though. Animating a background character has vastly different goals than animating the main character or something the camera is focused on. The background character has weight, moves naturally, and isn’t distracting. Done! Move on to the next shot.

For more complex shots though, you can have a number of goals you need to meet. You may need to convey a funny scene that makes the audience laugh, but with a Pixar/Disney level of quality. Getting that comedic timing, the expressions, the physical humor nailed down AND of the highest quality is what the very best animators strive for. It’s here, in the final polish stages that a majority of the work takes place.

Set yourself up for success early on and give yourself the time to really bring the shot home.

Our baker doesn’t just grab things out of the pantry and dump them in a bowl. All the ingredients are measured, the recipe is at hand, and all the cooking tools are laid out. With proper preparation and forethought, the baker can ensure he isn’t scrambling at the last minute to hastily slap some icing on a wedding cake, furiously throwing rosettes and sprinkles at it as they drive it off to the reception. If he can bake a delicious cake, he’s met the goal. Now it’s just a matter of giving himself enough time to make it pretty.

As long as you meet the goal of the shot and it “reads” properly (elicits the right reaction from the audience) then you can take the time to really nail the performance. You have the animation basics covered, the set strong key poses, the character has weight and life, and the scene conveys its story points with conviction. Now it’s time to finesse the eyelines, check the arcs, massage those splines. The Devil is in the details and a master animator can elicit laughs, anger, sympathy, or tears with just the manipulation of some pixels.

Ultimately, you’re done when you say you are, but as you get comfortable identifying the essence of the scene you will find it easier meeting your goals early on and leaving you ample time to push and tweak your shot. The ultimate result will be animation that is truly a pleasure for you and the audience because you know the shot just works.

And now, this blog post is done. Who wants cake?

CLIENT: NIMBLE COLLECTIVE
WORK: Blog Post
SOURCE: https://nimblecollective.com/how-do-you-know-when-your-animation-is-done/

April 18, 2017 — Mountain View, CA— Nimble Collective announces the release of ‘Sunny and Gerd in Spring Cleaning’ – an all-new whimsical animated short from studio partner Chocolate Soop.

This creative animated short featuring two little robots who live in a factory world is the first full release of a project created in collaboration with Nimble Collective’s Virtual Studio Service Platform. This Platform, when fully realized, will up-end the animation industry by giving Creators the tools they need to create and complete animated projects without requiring the backing of a multi-million dollar studio setting.

This original animation features robo-besties, Sunny and Gerd in their very first adventure as they use an interdimensional portal to clean up. What could go wrong?! Watch the full short here: Sunny and Gerd.

Nimble Collective, Inc., a Silicon Valley startup revolutionizing the animation industry by crafting the first cloud-native animation platform, allows creators to leverage experience and guidance from Academy Award-winning industry innovators. Working under the studio name ‘Chocolate Soop,’ self-taught, multi-faceted Canadian illustrator DaCosta Bayley, a longtime professional illustrator, is making his debut as a director with this project

More information about “Sunny and Gerd” and the project can be found at sunnyandgerd.com, and https://nimblecollective.com/dacosta/

About Nimble Collective

Nimble Collective, founded by Academy Award-winning animators and technology entrepreneurs, is revolutionizing the animation content market. The Mountain View, California startup is developing an end-to-end virtual streaming collaborative animation platform that will be the engine behind a new generation of animators and creators. With all the production capabilities of the animation pipeline hosted in a secure cloud environment, animators and their collaborators, wherever they are in the world, will be able to spend more time creating instead of managing complex and expensive infrastructure. ‘Be Your Own Studio.’ Learn more at NimbleCollective.com

CLIENT: NIMBLE COLLECTIVE
WORK: PRESS RELEASE
SOURCE: https://nimblecollective.com/nimble-collective-releases-chocolate-soop/

Technological advancements in animation have centered around shortening the time it takes to view animation output and enhancing the artist’s tools. Most times these advancements go hand in hand. Let’s face it; animation is a waiting game. You model and rig characters, build sets, position your lights, animate your action and send your scene off to render. And then … you wait. Get the footage back, make some quick adjustments, and then … you wait. That’s the nature of animation. Since the days of waiting for the film to develop the current method of sending off frames to render, you have to wait to see the fruits of your labor. Real-time rendering practically eliminates the waiting process by removing the rendering phase from the animation production pipeline. The closer you can get to the look of the final film early on and throughout the production process, the less time spent on guesswork, which means fewer revisions.

What Is Real-Time Rendering?

If you’ve played a video game, you’ve experienced real-time rendering. Instead of rendering single CG frames and then compiling those frames together for later playback, real-time rendering can display a CG environment complete with lighting, effects, textures, and simulations at about 60 frames per second. Taking the frame rendering down to milliseconds means it’s fast enough to be perceived as “real time.” Rendering all of those elements, as well as computing how they interact with each other, takes a lot of processing power. For this reason, video games have typically been designed to be simpler than film and TV, but the lines are starting to blur. To achieve the quality and detail of film and TV, hours and hours of computing time is used to create a single image. Most people have heard of Pixar’s single frames taking 20 hours or more to compute. With the advances in technology and processing power, incredibly realistic (or stylistic) environments with characters, props, sets, lights, and the entire game world can be created and displayed in fractions of a second. Real-time rendering does all the computing and studios are already seeing up to a 30% to 50% time savings.

Real-Time Rendering Workflow

Peter Monga, an independent animator from New Zealand, is creating his own children’s television series using the Unreal engine. With proper planning and by creating stylistic characters and simple environments he’s set himself up with a streamlined workflow for creating episodes of Morgan Lives in a Rocket House. Using software like Maya and Photoshop for animating and texturing, he can skip sending his work to a render farm and ignore the entire lighting, rendering, and compositing part of the process. He can adjust things like depth of field, color grading, ambient occlusion, reflections, and a ton of elements that would otherwise overload the budget.

For the creation of Mr. Carton, Michaël Bolufer harnessed the power of the Unity engine for his 13 episode series. Using Unity allowed the team to bypass the time-consuming CG rendering and compositing process and do the sequencing for each episode directly in the editor using Flux. Being able to go straight to sequencing with the animations, models, camera, lighting, and scene elements is where the time and cost benefits of real-time rendering shine.

Real-Time Rendering and FX

Big budget films are making use of real-time technology to streamline production time and costs. High fidelity previews mean shorter iterations in pre-production. Halon Entertainment pushed the previsualization envelope with their work on War for the Planet of the Apes. By making real-time rendering a core part of the early previs process, high-quality shots with large datasets and complex imagery were able to be reviewed quickly, and adjustments to the shot could be made on the fly. With the ability to immediately move cameras and scene elements, the director was able to see the shot in action and make decisions about camera placement and composition. This ability to implement immediate, well-vetted feedback was a huge time saver down the line, and those early decisions meant the team was able to focus on crafting the film elements that would have the most visual impact. Real-time rendering doesn’t even have to be traditional character animation. Just about any element in a film that needs to be rendered can be done with a real-time engine: such as those dynamic user interface elements we see on heads-up displays or futuristic touch screens. FX artist Vincent Parker was able to create live interface displays for the film Passengers that could be installed on set for the actors to interact and touch. Using a Unity engine meant he could update the UI/UX for the screens in real time without the need to pull the set piece apart to plug in the new graphics. It also allowed the actors to touch actual screens with a real interface, instead of filming hand motions that FX artists would then have to match up to rendered digital effects later on.

Limitations of Real-Time Rendering

The most significant bottleneck of real-time rendering is the processing power of the host machine. Those milliseconds can start getting longer and longer the more information the screen has to display. Most animation can be done beforehand and imported, but dynamic elements like shadows, particles (smoke, grass, water), and gravity require more robust processors to deal with all the additional information. Without enough processing power, the scene could start stuttering or become a virtual slideshow as the computer struggles to display everything in the scene. Hair and clothing also pose a particular problem as these elements typically interact directly with dynamic elements, like a character model. Since these are non-scripted elements, they can cause unforeseen issues like clipping or displacement. This limitation is why in many games (like Fortnite and Firewatch) and video productions (like Morgan and Mr. Carton) the clothing and hair are modeled into the character. One way to add more elements to your scene is to lower the level of detail displayed, so it becomes a balancing game of quantity over quality. It’s a trade-off that professionals can deftly balance and over time the rendering engines themselves will become better at making those adjustments on the fly.

The Future of Real-Time Rendering

In just the past five years, real-time rendering has evolved by leaps and bounds. Real-time engines are climbing the charts in popularity among the current rendering software choices. The ability to render a single still image quickly is a driving force for real-time render users, especially in the CAD and architectural field. More and more people looking to offset production costs and get more done in a shorter amount of time and that means more time for creativity and innovation. While the real-time rendering engines have evolved to the point that beautiful films and games are being created within the current limitations, advances in A.I. mean that steps like denoising will eventually be handled automatically so that even highly detailed scenes will ultimately be rendered in real time. OTOY has already made advances in A.I. denoising that allow for 200 sample, near perfect results, in real-time. As processing power increases the ability to simulate elements like cloth and hair in scenes will also likely go real-time. Take a character out for a spin and put them through their paces to see how things like particle effects will interact with the scene. As long as the processing power is there, more and more subtle physics can be computed in each scene. Real-time rendering will also creep into our daily lives as we interact more and more with photo-realistic avatars who can mimic the facial expressions and actions of off-screen actors. Someday you may be talking with someone online who isn’t even a real person, and you’d never be able to tell. Player characters and A.I. driven NPCs in games would be nearly indistinguishable. Your favorite actor may not even be a real person at some point. As real-time rendering bleeds into real life, the creative possibilities are limitless.

CLIENT: NIMBLE COLLECTIVE
WORK: Blog Post
SOURCE: https://nimblecollective.com/animation-industry-trends-of-2017-going-to-the-cloud/

CLIENT: NIMBLE COLLECTIVE
WORK: BLOG POST
SOURCE: https://nimblecollective.com/animation-industry-trends-of-2018-its-about-to-get-real-with-real-time/

CLIENT: NIMBLE COLLECTIVE
WORK: BLOG POST
SOURCE: https://nimblecollective.com/animation-industry-trends-of-2017-going-to-the-cloud/

During a break in my cartooning schedule, I had created a mascot design for a new restaurant called “The Brave Little Chicken” (or something along those lines. The restaurant name is in Spanish.) The design request was “A little chick. Brave. Defiant.”

I started off with some general ideas. Bravery, defiance … all wrapped up in a little baby chick. I toyed with the idea of using the egg or eggshells as armor of some sort (including a fleeting “Bobba Fett” look).

I discarded that idea pretty quickly. I opted more for a wooden sword, maybe a cloak or cape: toys a child would use in an adventure. I gave the baby chick a defiant stance with sword raised and chest out. I utilized a streamlined look for the chicks body that I really liked and that gave me a strong line of action.

I eventually decided that I would replace the armor and weapons for things more in line with a food services mascot. Keeping the active and defiant poses, I swapped in chefs hats, spoons and assorted chef accouterments. I also worked on the face, testing minimalist, cartoony and “animated” styles. I preferred the small eyes over large “cutesy” eyes as I felt the big cutesy eyes are just overdone in company logos and mascots where babies and tiny animals are used.

I nailed down a few more poses and tightened up the sketches. I settled on two poses: an action-filled “charge” and a defiant/proud stance. I enhanced the youth of the little chicken by setting the eyes farther apart and giving him a large, rounded head. I also finally settled on a spatula as the weapon of choice.

I did final inks and then scanned them in at 300 DPI in pure black and white. I took the scanned in line art into Illustrator to convert it to vector art and make adjustments like smoothing out some line work and re-positioning some of the anchors.

The final step was to add color. I “punched out” all the white space which left me with just the black line art. I chose very simple colors that would work with a three-color print process (black, yellow and orange) with an option of four-color on a non-white background. This should help keep printing costs down. After that, it was just a matter of sending the file off to the customer.

So if you are ever in Mexico and come across “El Pollito Valiente” and drop by for a bit to eat, tell ’em the “artista de pollito” says “hola”.