Calendars are an excellent way to both connect with a target audience and promote the name of your organization. Many businesses use calendars for giveaways, or a charity organization may print calendars to use as a fundraiser. Designing a 12-month photo calendar can be a lengthy process but well worth the effort once completed because of the ability for a calendar to daily promote your company. Be sure to plan ahead before beginning the design and layout of your calendar for a smooth and successful printing process.
Many calendar printing companies offer templates for design. Before choosing the layout and size of your calendar, peruse the templates for creative design ideas. Popular sizes include a mini 6×9 up to the large 12×12 design. Choose one that will fit your purpose and appeal to your target audience.
Begin gathering photographs of your company, landscapes, or any other subject you have chosen for your calendar design. You may even want to write witty or inspirational messages to imprint onto each photograph. Remember to use only high resolution images to avoid pixilation when enlarged.
Decide which events you want to include in your calendar. For promotional purposes, include reminders for service updates. For instance, a car dealership may want to incorporate friendly reminders for oil changes each month. An animal shelter may want to include fundraising event dates.
Finally, when printing your calendars, use a wholesale printer as this will allow you to print large quantities at a reduced cost. Just be sure your calendar printing company uses four color offset printing so that your calendars promote your company professionally all year long.
Filed under: Print Place General | Tags: advertising, artist, creative, graphic design, marketing
In response to: http://www.graphicdefine.org/issue4/thinklikeadesigner
For the newly graduated art school major or the non-schooled artist, here’s an overview of some careers you can explore. And not having a college degree when you’re an artist can work for you or against you. It just depends on the employer. Bigger corporate-types generally want a degreed graphic designer but smaller companies and artists hiring artists won’t hold it against you. Just make sure you have a great portfolio that shows off all your different creative sides.
Web Design
This is a growing field, obviously. If companies or individuals don’t have a Web site nowadays, they aren’t going anywhere fast. Most of the jobs here deal with corporations that have large Web sites that have hundreds of pages and needed constant updates or redesigns.
You could also work for a design agency, building templates for Web pages or by building one client’s basic Web site and then never seeing that client again. Some graphic designers create the icons and other elements, like shopping carts, that go on the Web site.
Agencies
You could work for a design agency, an advertising agency or a PR agency. (The last two are sometimes one in the same.) Working for an agency can give you a lot of work variety. You could build a Web site for one client one week and work on a direct mail postcard for another client the next week. If you have great computer skills, you might also work on videos that incorporate animations or graphic design.
Entertainment Industry
You could work on movies, TV shows or commercial sets – basically anything that has a graphic element in it in Hollywood. You could even work for a movie studio just designing movie posters. You can make the most money in graphic design by going to Hollywood – but can you afford to live there? That’s the question! You could also work for local TV stations in your area, designing graphics for the local news or local TV shows. The salaries, of course, won’t be nearly as high in your area as they are in Hollywood.
Corporate
Businesses now hire designers to create logos and marketing materials in-house instead of outsourcing to an agency or a freelancer. You could design advertisements, charts and other graphics for business-related reports and company newsletters. A corporate designer might also be in charge of the Web site and any other graphic design needs. You can get a lot of variety here as well since you’ll probably be looked upon as a Jack-of-all-trades.
Books and Magazines
Books and magazines are forms of entertainment, but they’re also corporations, so I’ve put them in their own category. You can design book covers, layout books and draw illustrations for them. You can help layout magazines and even design or redesign a magazine.
Freelance
You can take on whatever clients you want and set your own rates. However, business can be feast or famine at any time. You’ll need to get some experience under your belt before you can go freelance full time. There’s nothing wrong with freelancing for other companies on your own time while working full time somewhere else. Working freelance means you get to work in whatever medium you like best, whether that is advertising or Web site design.
In response to http://www.graphicdefine.org/issue4/whatruselling
Brands are customer perceptions of your product or company. You can create a logo, a tag line and create a look and feel in your marketing materials that gives off your business’s personality (a business’s personality is another definition of a brand), but it’s the way your customers interpret your branding that really gives your brand meaning. Try as you might, your customers decide what your brand is, not you.
And why do we need brands, anyway?
The obvious answer is to differentiate one company from another. To let consumers know what we think of ourselves and how we would like them to think of us. These days consumers have so much info at their fingertips through the Internet that they need our brands to tell the companies apart.
A customer’s brand experience will help them decide whether to ever buy from that brand again. A brand can also help a customer feel more at ease with their purchases – a brand is partly based on reputation. A consistent brand, like McDonald’s, lets people know that no matter what state they’re in they can get a Big-Mac and French fries that will taste the same as the ones from a McDonald’s the next state over. People know they can get quick, tasty food at cheap prices from any McDonald’s.
Brands help people achieve their desired identity
People buy $200 jeans that are made of the same material as a $50 pair of jeans simply for the label, the brand. Why? It makes them feel good. People desire to be in a class or status that is higher than where they currently are and buying a brand name can give them a little piece of that desired identity. When someone walks around with a $200 pair of jeans on, other people will know what that person paid for the jeans and most will have a different opinion of him.
Why else would people spend so much money on brand-name items when they could have the exact same thing for generic items? It all has to do with consumer perception. People perceive brand names to have a higher quality than generics. You can read the ingredient list on the back of a bottle of generic ibuprofen and compare it to all the same ingredients in a bottle of Advil, but you’ll feel the urge to pay the extra 50 cents or dollar for the Advil.
Brands create associations. The Advil and the generic have the exact same ingredients, but you’ve seen Advil commercials. You’ve seen how those people’s aches and pains went away from using a trusted brand of medicine that’s been around a long time. Besides, you can afford it, right? You don’t want the cashier to think that you have to stoop to buying generic pain medication.
That’s what brands do – they identify a company, but they also identify their consumers. Brands help distinguish companies from one another, and to an extent, they help distinguish people from one another.
Filed under: Print Place General | Tags: david ogilvy, layout, marketing, writing
David Ogilvy is someone to be admired. He is considered to be one of the greatest advertising minds ever. Some might say he shouldn’t be so admired for dropping out of college (what kind of image does that send to the kids?), but others say he should be admired for being able to start one of the world’s largest advertising agencies with no college education.
Well, no matter what you think of Ogilvy, you have to admit that he greatly influenced how advertising professionals advertise today.
Ogilvy’s book “Ogilvy on Advertising” is one of the advertising greats. Here are a few highlights from the book that pertain specifically to layout and writing, which every advertiser or marketer has to deal with for any type of print material.
Layout principles
Ogilvy was all about research. Before starting his advertising agency, Ogilvy and Mather, he worked for Gallup, conducting polls. This research background spilled over into advertising, which hadn’t seen much research before Ogilvy.
1. Graphics first. Ogilvy found (through research) that when it comes to print ads, readers look at a graphic first, then the headline, then the caption and finally, the copy.
2. Headline second. If you don’t have a graphic, then the headline moves in to first place. Ogilvy found that five times as many people read headlines as they do body copy. Therefore, include the name of your product in your headline.
3. Serif fonts are easier to read than sans serif fonts. This is one of the first things I was taught in my college Journalism design classes. Ogilvy also believed that words containing all capital letters were hard to READ. Eyes read all capital letters one letter at a time. It’s best to use both upper- and lowercase letters.
4. Use drop-initials. Drop-initials, or drop caps, “increase readership by an average of 13 percent” according to Ogilvy. I always thought it was a style thing, but I guess I should have known there would be a method to design madness that I didn’t know about!
Writing principles
1. “Specifics work better than generalities.” Whether it’s advertising copy, a television commercial script or an article in a newspaper, specifics always garner more interest than vague references.
2. “Long copy sells more than short.” Of course, you don’t want to make your copy too long or people will lose interest. However, by using subheads, you can keep readers’ interest in longer copy.
3. “Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium.” This is a great one, because when marketers or advertisers sit down to write, they usually have the target audience in their minds. What they should have in their minds instead is one target consumer. Write like you are writing to one person only and use “you” a lot to build a relationship with each consumer. Your copy will be more personal and therefore, better.
