How many common printing items – newsletters, post cards, brochures, note pads, note cards, thank you notes – do you routinely use for communicating with customers and prospects? How long has it been since you looked at those items with a fresh eye?

If you were to lay everything out on a table, would the company name, logo, and contact information be consistently displayed on each item? Do fonts change from item to item? Is the company’s web site on each piece? These consistencies are the elements of brand identity and are important no matter what your company size or location or how many items you routinely print.

But while it is important to maintain consistency and predictability for your brand identity, it can be refreshing to move away from conformity in the size and shape of common printing items. In this issue of Printips we’ll offer a few simple changes that will make common printing items eye-catching and unique.

http://macgra.com/0905Printips.pdf

We often use Printips to share information about graphic design. Our purpose for this is simple: the more you know about good graphic design, the better you’ll be able to analyze your organization’s sales and marketing materials for effectiveness.

There is a significant correlation between the success – or failure – of marketing material and how well the information in it is presented and organized. So pull out a flyer or advertisement or product information sheet and follow along as we review the basics of page layout.

There are four basic elements that are the building blocks of page design:
• The headline establishes the purpose of the page;
• The copy provides the facts, features and benefits;
• A visual element like a photograph or graphic illustrates the copy;
• The signature contains the company’s name, logo, and contact information.

To make the elements work effectively, they must be organized to consider hierarchy—the ranking of elements on the page by importance – and reader eye flow, a description of how the reader’s eye moves around on the page.

http://macgra.com/0901Printips.pdf

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.
— Douglas Noel Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

As digital technology evolved from graphic design to page layout to web design, graphic artists adapted software tools and design principles to work in the new discipline. Initially, many designers with roots in graphic design for print migrated to the less controllable and more fluid design environment of the World Wide Web while retaining skills in design for print.

Today the situation is different. A graphic designer may train only for web design and have no experience with print. And even though design for print and design for web both must consider how to display text and graphics, how to use color and typography, and how to guide the reader around the page, the two design environments are very different. To be successful, today’s graphic designer must either understand the requirements for design in each, or limit their activities to web or print.

In this issue of Printips we’ll discuss three primary differences between the two environments and explain why what works in one may not work in the other.

http://macgra.com/0812Printips.pdf