Communicating via visual means is central to the selling process. Imagine trying to explain your product or service without having the assistance of a brochure, a display ad, or a web site. Think how difficult it would be to differentiate your product from others on the shelf without attractive packaging. All buying decisions include some amount of emotion – how would you quickly evoke emotion without the assistance of images?

Visual communication is a process that uses investigation, analysis, and planning to identify a communication requirement as a first step in designing something meant to be seen rather than heard or felt. Visual communication is a broad discipline that uses graphic design, drawing, illustration, typography, and color to convey a thought, to inform, to educate, or to persuade a target audience.

You may have heard us use the term graphic design when discussing a marketing or sales-related printed piece, creating or refreshing a logo, or updating a web site. What we mean by this is all the techniques, from composition to page layout, that are needed to prepare for the final step – printing, taking a web site live, branding, etc.

http://www.macgra.com/1010Printips.pdf

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

Whether your task is to design a sales brochure, a display ad, or a newsletter, the purpose is the same: to communicate a message to an audience and to produce a desired response. Put simply, you want to say something to someone so that the person takes a specific action. What this means is that the design you develop is not just about appearance – it is also about the performance of the target audience. Thus good design is measured equally by form and function.

In The Desktop Publisher’s Idea Book, Chuck Green describes five steps that form the basis of good design:

• Set the goal
• Compose the message
• Choose the medium
• Select a design
• Illustrate the message

http://macgra.com/0806Printips.pdf

It has been more than 20 years since Paul Brainerd, the founder of Aldus Corporation, coined the term desktop publishing to distinguish his software program PageMaker from professional typesetting. Over that time period, typesetting has migrated from the world of commercial printing and publishing to homes and offices. The quality of type produced by today’s inexpensive and readily available software programs is very different from the primitive appearance of type generated by early desktop publishing programs.

One result of typesetting’s migration to the desktop is the need for a wide variety of people – from art directors to graphic designers, as well as marketing professionals and administrative executives – to learn something about typography. A simple definition of typography is the layout of text on a printed page, but in a broader sense, it is a form of visual communication that effectively increases reader understanding.

In traditional typography, good text composition (page layout) –the arrangement of fonts on the page, the alignment of text, and the manipulation of text, white space, and graphics – improves visual appearance so the reader doesn’t notice the composition. Instead, the reader’s entire attention is focused on the message the text intends to convey.

http://macgra.com/0804Printips.pdf

You are likely familiar with the proverb “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Those seven words succinctly convey how powerfully a graphic image enhances our understanding of a concept or idea. Interestingly, the modern use of the proverb is attributed to an article by Fred R. Barnard in an advertising trade journal called Printer’s Ink. In his 1921 article, Barnard promoted the use of images to augment advertisements on streetcars. What was true in 1921 remains true today – graphic images enliven the appearance, impact and reader comprehension of a printed piece.

However, to get the greatest benefit, the images must be of sufficient quality to blend in with the design. Think of the last time you saw a color photograph in a newspaper that was very blurry – the result of the image being out of register. Did you notice the content of the photograph, or just the fact that it was out of register?

http://macgra.com/0706Printips.pdf