Direct mail

Our next project is a direct mail postcard.  The purpose of this piece is to send out to a specific list of people that match the criteria.  The call to action is to come into the store.  The target audience is college age men and women.  This project is 5X7 with 1/8" bleed and 1/4" margins.  It is two sided and full color.  I got a price quote for 500 of these for $153.16.

 thumbs

roughs

final

On this project I used three 4 color rasters, a reverse, and vector art from the master image list.  All images were from the istock photo folder which I have permission to use.  The logo element I created in illustrator.

Preflight Check List Process

Preflight is the act of inspecting files for errors prior to sending them for print.  The purpose of preflight is to help find mistakes and avoid money costing and time consuming errors.  Below is a link to a PDF of a well explained preflight check list.

Preflight.pdf

There are actually preflight jobs out there in the industry.  Prepress file prep specialist's job is to ensure the jobs are properly formatted for print.  The average salary is about $38,000 a year.


Sources:

http://www.ehow.com/info_7811006_average-prepress-file-prep-specialist.html

http://www.cmprintmail.com/4043CMPrin/Preflight.pdf

QR codes?

This somewhat ugly but useful thing is called a QR code.  Over the past few years these have been used more and more.  I work at Walmart (i hate it), and I see them on almost everything now.  QR codes are basically a way to bring print and multimedia together for the same purpose.  The idea is to scan this with your smartphone and it will take you to a link, video, picture, or a website.  If you scan the one above, it will take you back to this very blog you are reading.  As far as how small they can go and still be scanned themobilists say about 3/4".  They should be high contrast with the background.  The longer the url of the link the more complex the QR code is therefore being harder to read.  There should be a border around the code at least 1/8" wide.


Source: http://www.themobilists.com/2011/10/11/qr-code-best-practices-in-print/

Self Promo Notepad

Our first project of the semester is to design a self promotional notepad with a QR code on it that takes you to our blog.  The target audience is future employers and the call to action is to go to our blog.

These are my thumbnails.

And this is my rough.

This is what I ended up with for the final version.

For this project we had to get a quote for 100 black and white notepads at 50 sheets apiece with a chipboard backing.  To get 100 of these made it would cost $123.53 total.