Tricks of the Trade

By Tara Blair

Most professionals discover a few tips and tricks during their career that allows them to complete a job with ease and quickens their work flow. At Gale, we’re no different. We have a few tricks up our sleeves, and thought why not share a couple of our favorites with our readers? Although we use a handful of media and imagery applications on a daily basis, we chose two of our favorites to share with you today. Without further ado, I introduce Canva and Word Swag. Two helpful applications that can be utilized in marketing (and everyday life).

My personal favorite, Word Swag, allows users to add text to photos in seconds. Creating beautiful, custom text layouts is easy with the “Exclusive Typomatic Engine” – a term appropriately coined to describe the one tap text layout modifier Word Swag is famous for. Color, size, and skew are a few more easily operated text options offered to make your caption pop. And just in case writer’s block gets the best of you, the app inspires creativity with hundreds of pre-designed quotes, thoughts, and jokes. Best of all, not only are there over 290,000  Pixabay background photos to choose from, but uploading personal photos right from your phone is also an option. Word Swag is an easy-to-use graphic designer app that makes marketing and advertising seem effortless, even on the go! Take a look below at some samples made by everyday users!

thebaseproject amongmany  LOY2016

richardlazarte  wordswagapp2  he_is_my_strength

 

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Discovering History Through Digital Newspaper Collections

Posted on March 2, 2016

By Seth Cayley

Can cocaine really cure sea-sickness? Something tells me that very little peer-reviewed research has been done on the subject in recent years. But that didn’t stop the Victorians. From around 1870-1915 a large number of narcotics, including heroin, were widely and legally available, and often packaged as medicines. Historians have dubbed this period before the first international drug control treaties as “The Great Binge”.

I first came across The Great Binge when browsing through bound volumes of the Illustrated London News for the first time at university. While I was supposed to be looking for news items about pre-First World War Europe, my eyes kept on being drawn to the adverts. Leafing through these, I learnt that: smoking Joy’s cigarettes could help with bronchitis; a certain brand of men’s underwear does not shrink; and that an electric hairbrush could cure my “nervous headache” (although I was pretty certain my headache that day had other causes common to students).

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Have Our Advertising Efforts Stalled? Share Your Thoughts on Gale’s Newest Campaign

Large Print Ad from Gale’s Thorndike Press

By Harmony Faust 

Gale has a long history of sponsoring different events and programs for our library partners at the various tradeshows we attend throughout each year. We love to throw a good party and often sponsor opening receptions, luncheons and of course, the busses at ALA Annual.

Read moreHave Our Advertising Efforts Stalled? Share Your Thoughts on Gale’s Newest Campaign