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SO PEOPLE WILL LISTEN So you want to design your own piece? It's one thing to crank out a business card, brochure or leaflet of some kind. But getting somebody to read it - and be affected by it - that's something else! To make your piece effective, there are basic decisions you'll have to make to produce a piece that not only meets your needs, but also catches and holds the attention of your clients. Below is specific direction, based upon our experience, to help guide you through decisions you'll have to make to reach your production goals. Topics include: Preliminary Planning Layout Planning
What do I want to accomplish with this piece? It's important that you have a clear understanding of the purpose of your printed piece. Is it to inform? To impress? To introduce? How your piece will look and what it'll contain is intimately determined by its purpose. For example: there are many different types of newsletters we produce and print here. Some are for information purposes only and are from business to business. With these, the most important items conveyed is timely information. Publications such as these have little extra color, limited graphics and usually no photographs because their purpose is conveyed more economically without them. On the other hand, we design and print business newsletters that are from management to their employees. These newsletters are designed with abundant photos, relatable graphics, applicable typefaces and appealing layout. The personal involvement of management and care for the employees is the purpose of the newsletter and so the design is very different than the former. Or as they say, "form follows function." You'll also have to determine . . .
The most attractive piece with the sharpest graphics and the most well written copy will lay unread or quickly trashed if it doesn't meet the needs of your recipients in some way. The age old adage is true, "People do things that they feel will benefit themselves." If your written piece doesn't meet some real need in your targeted audience, your piece won't fulfill the purpose you intended it to. People are not primarily interested in how you look, what you do, or what your business produces. These are simply features. They are interested in benefits. They are mainly interested in how what you do or what your business produces can help them. Determine their needs, develop a plan to meet them, and then produce a piece that focuses on helping them get or do what they need or want and you will have taken a major step to producing an effective piece. Skip this step and most of what you do that follows will be done for naught.
Business cards and stationery are pretty straightforward. But what if you have much information to convey that's mailed or handed out? In this case, there'll be limitations on size. Perhaps a folded brochure, leaflet or self mailer might best meet your needs rather than a one- or two-sided flat piece that limits content. If it's not obvious, talk to your account representative where you'll have your piece printed. He/she can be a great resource for ideas.
Once you've decided your purpose and the type of piece it'll be, you'll have to decide what you want it to say. Secure the text for the body, the headings, subheading and any photos/graphics/images. You won't be able to make many of the below decisions if you don't. Many decisions concerning additional images, colors, fonts and the type of application program needed will be based on the amount and content of the text. Too often we've been given only a partial part of a design job. We set up the layout and send it back to the customer for approval only to find out that additional material needs to be included. In some cases this significantly changes the layout, adding cost to the job and delaying its delivery.
Additional colors (in addition to black) can add pizzazz and spark to a printed piece. They can turn a piece that is drab and bland into one more appealing and readable. But it'll also cost more and perhaps not be cost effective for your purpose(s). You must choose wisely. First, a little about adding color. All colors are printed as either a spot color or as process color. Spot colors are usually selected from a Pantone color book. For each color added, the exact color of the ink is mixed and added to the press. A new negative and plate must be produced for each color. Unlike a color laser that produces a myriad of colors almost as fast as it produces two with one pass through the laser, each color is layed down separately. They are usually truer to Pantone swatch color than the equivalent 4-color process color. Process colors are also referred to as 4-color process or CMYK. Process colors are produced from combinations of the colors of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK. 4-color process printing involves preparation of 4 negatives and plates. The combinations of different percentages of CMY and K produce the color images. With process colors, one can add as many colors as one desires without any additional cost after the initial setup. However, the resultant colors might not be accurate to the Pantone swatch since up to 50% of Pantone colors can't be accurately translated into CMYK but are only approximated. Color photos are usually reproduced by this process. Adding one or two additional colors to a job is usually best done with spot color. If you add color(s), you'll have to decide how many and whether they'll be spot or process. To determine if adding extra colors is for you, check out your budget and your purpose. If the reason for your piece is to impress or convert people to your product or company, adding extra color may be the way to go. If you do decide to use an additional color or two, here's a hint: don't overdo it. Pieces that use about as much of a second or third color as they do the main color (usually black) look awkward and unattractive - and so defeats the purpose of the extra color(s). Use the extra color perhaps in a heading, as 10% screen behind a box, as a border of a box, perhaps as a dropcap or a subhead. But certainly not all, or most of the aforementioned items. Extra colors are to be used as complements, not as competitors to the main color. Additional information can be found under color printing in the resource section.
Graphics, photos and any other additional elements all must relate to the purpose and theme of the piece. For the personal touch, photos of the main subject(s) relate well. We've seen too often graphics placed in a piece that actually detracted from the theme or message - or that lent no appreciable significance to the message. Perhaps you can personalize a graphics in some way using one of the art application programs such as Freehand or Illustrator. These programs along with Photoshop give you the capability of opening graphics, changing features and adding text or additional items. It can be effective when used properly. But adding photos and graphics will generally cost more. Photos and screened graphics cannot just be pasted down on a camera ready copy. They must be scanned, resized (in most cases) and placed in the piece through the application program (see below), either by the designer, printer or yourself. The photos and screened graphics are converted into dot patterns called halftones when outputted from the application program. A negative will also have to be produced in most cases. Another consideration is the space available. The most important parts of the piece are the body text, headings and subheadings. Graphics, photos and images should only be used to complement the message. First priority should be adequate size of type to convey the message. Graphics and photos should only be added if space is available.
Do I have the skill to use them? The answer to this lies in what is the complexity of the job. For a simple job - one color (usually black), no graphics or photos, almost anything will work. If you have a good laser, you'll be able to supply your printer with a reasonably good camera ready copy from which they'll be able to print. If the job involves multiple colors, images or gray photos, a higher grade of application software may be needed. Microsoft Office is great for the word processing jobs, but very quickly reaches its limitations when additional colors are needed or images are to be used. Word does not have the capability to separate colors to an imagesetter, nor will the photos/images reproduce sharply in many cases. For a more complex job with multiple colors, other higher level application programs such as QuarkXPress or PageMaker are advisable. At Eagle Graphics, Inc., we use QuarkXPress exclusively for all our production work to our laser printers and imagesetter because of its superiority. PageMaker is only used when it's needed to run out a disk by a customer. For the production and manipulation of artwork, Illustrator and Freehand are state of the art. Photoshop is also the program of choice for image manipulation. All of these programs can save their artwork to either TIF or EPS files. These programs are not cheap, however. Neither are they simple to operate. The learning curve can be steep. They should only be used to prepare artwork and images for importation into QuarkXPress or PageMaker, not to send the file directly to the imagesetter.
The message you want to convey to your reader is so important. That message is found in the body text, headlines, captions, and graphics/photos/images and the fonts you choose to convey that message. The fonts you choose speak silently to the reader. The styles you choose reveal a message. They must be consistent with the text message and complement it. If not, your message will be compromised. In choosing fonts, there are three types to select from. 1. Stylistic fonts. These are the special type of fonts that have a message or theme built into their appearance. Fonts such as Stencil, Critter, Dear Teacher, Celebrity, Pixie, Toontime, Radical, Party, Oldtext, OldTowne, Funhouse, and Embassy all have an appearance that reflects their name. They usually do not have bold or italic renderings. They're usually also harder to read for more than a line or two maximum. For this reason, they are mostly found in the headings, and in special places, since they call attention to themselves. 2. Sans Serif fonts. These are fonts made mostly of straight lines without any of the "feet" or "serifs" that many other fonts have. Helvetica, Arial, Univers, Frutiger, Futura, GillSans and Century Gothic are a few. The term "Sans" means "without." Since these types are harder to read, they're used mostly for headings, subheadings and captions. Occasionally you find them as the main text. 3. Serif fonts. These are the most popular. Fonts of this category have little "feet" or "serifs" at the bottoms, sides, and tops of the fonts. These "feet" guide our eyes to the next letter for easier reading. Serif fonts are generally more readable than any of the other categories. For this reason, most text in magazines, books and other publications are written in the serif fonts. Examples of this type are Times, New Times Roman, Garamond, Goudy. Look at some national magazines. Notice how fonts are used in their publications. Usually they'll have one or at the most two fonts for the text. Rather than use a different font for every headline, subhead, caption, or other callout, many of them use variations of the same font or use a few different sans or stylistic fonts. What do you want to convey in your piece? Is it strength? Try Aachan for a heading or subheading. Fun? Try Pixie, Party, Funhouse, Mistral or Present. Childhood activities? Try Critter or Dear Teacher. Honor, dignity or appreciation? Try Medici, ZapfChancery or Embassy. Only use a stylistic font that will convey your message. In summary, some guidelines:
250? 500? 1000? 2000? or more? Before you decide, here's some tips and info we've learned at Eagle Graphics, Inc. to help you decide. First, let's look at the printing process. When a letterhead, brochure, business card, etc. is printed, the cost is determined by the amount of paper used, the supplies needed (as ink, metal plates (if needed), negatives used etc.) and the time it takes to print the job. The time is generally the greatest expense. Whether 500 or 5,000 are printed, many of the same procedures must be done. The mixing and loading of the ink into the press, making the negative and/or preparing the plate, mounting and adjusting the press, preparing the feed for the particular paper, loading the paper onto the press and cleaning the press. The actual press run time is often only a fraction amount of the time required to run a specific job on the press. That's why the price of 2,000 letterheads is not twice the cost of 1,000 but some percentage of it. To run the additional 1000 letterheads depends only upon the speed of the press which can be 5,500 or more pieces per hour. At this speed, the extra 1,000 can be printed in only 11 minutes. Therefore, when ordering a certain number, consider the following items:
Now comes the fun stuff - putting it all together. Whether you're designing a business card or a hundred page ad book, the procedure is about the same. Here are some tips in the different areas.
Here's some tricks we've used to expand or shrink text, graphics, and photos to fill a page.
Proofing is a lost art in today's technological age. Our application programs come built in with spell checkers, word counters and grammar correctors. Yet these just don't get the job done! One misused word or omitted word that a spell checker can't identify can nullify an entire job. It's difficult to proof your own work. It's easy to look directly at an error you've made and not notice it. We've had clients submit a camera ready disk job where they've read over it themselves many times. Yet our proofing department found errors. It's always a good idea to have somebody else proof your work before you submit it for printing. Also, don't rely on spell checkers. They'll be able to catch a large number of errors. But in many cases they won't catch all of them, especially where the word is correct, but its usage, punctuation or capitalization is wrong. Take our proofing quiz to see what we mean. by Dan Demshar
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