Creative Tips & Advice ↓

Quick creative tip…

If you’ve designed a brochure that includes copy changes reversing out of a four-color background (a headline, for example), consider changing that background to a PMS fifth color. By doing this, each version change will only affect one plate instead of all four plates. This will more than offset the increase in cost of changing to a five-color brochure.

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It is important to give typography as much consideration in solving a design problem as color, imagery and composition. Experience and sensitivity to type design will make the difference between a piece that merely “reads” to one that “communicates”.

Keep a file of brochures, magazine articles, ads, etc that you find appealing. What strikes you about each? Can you identify the typefaces used? Notice the difference between the headlines and body copy.

And the typefaces should be complimentary. This can often be achieved through a mix of serif and sans serif fonts. Attention should also be given to line breaks in headlines and body copy. How does the copy read?

Here are 3 more tips:

1. Avoid more than one hyphen in a row, widows and large gaps in the end of lines.
2. Adjust letter spacing in headlines as many fonts have poorly designated kerning pairs.
3. Letter spacing should look consistent whether the copy is set tightly or spaced out for a wide look.

Today’s blog post might be an obvious tip for some Marketing professionals, but we have a perfect example below as to why it’s worth mentioning.

When you’re quoting out your direct mail campaign that involves an outer envelope, always look at 2 color versus 4 color.

We did this for a potential client recently. The outer envelope was a 6×9 and we quoted it 2 color and 4 color…all other specs were the same.

The end result was that the 2 color version reduced the cost by 60%.

There are more variables, however, that go into this. For example, the quantity on this project was smaller than usual for us, but we have a printer in our network that has a small, 2 color jet press with really aggressive pricing.

Your print vendor should be looking into all options for you to reduce costs. This includes determining the best printing equipment for the job.

It’s what we do for all our clients and sometimes we undercover significant cost savings like this example shows.