Print Design TipsTips and Information About Printing

Using images and designs in your document can make or break the impression it creates.  With the advent of desktop publishing, anyone with a printer and computer felt they could now take their monthly newsletter in-house and wow their staff  and colleagues with computer know-how.  Unfortunately, many have felt that they can add some X-Factor with clients and prospects and this is a one-way road to disaster.

Clip-art has its uses but client facing documents and any document which is being used outside of a business is not one of them.  Clip-art is cheap and can be fun when it is being used for the club newsletter or to announce a family event such as a house move or a party.  Clip-art has no place in a document you seriously expect a potential customer to pick-up, read and then contact you with the intention of doing some business.

Clip-art is free for a reason – it doesn’t sell your document, your business or your services and products.

Using photographs is a double-edged sword.  Good photographs and images are usually not free; many images have a copyright restriction attaching to them and if you do not own the rights to the image or have permission to use it, you are in for a legal shock.  Using photographs without the copyright holder’s permission can lead to legal action for damages and compensation.  It can even lead to you having to go through the expensive exercise of throwing your document away in the trash because you cannot get permission at all.

Very embarrassing and not recommended – always make sure you have permission or own the image.

If you are taking the photographs yourself, makes sure they are of appropriate quality.  Nothing speaks “amateur hour” more than a slightly out of focus shot or one where the subject is not properly positioned.  Using a photograph of a product is important because this is establishing the visualization in the mind of the reader – it pays to take the time to get the product positioned in the proper setting and to ensure you are capturing the detail necessary.

It is usually cost effective to hire a professional photographer to perform the shots for you.  Getting the photographs wrong may render your entire document ineffectual and force you to incur extra expense and delay in getting the shots done again.  Frequently, design projects are up against deadlines and tight schedules, and making this mistake leads to additional costs elsewhere in the production process which will more than outweigh the cost of a professional.

You must also ensure that the images produced are available in a format which will allow your print and design partners to manage and manipulate effectively.  Poor or incorrect resolution, ill-lit images or incorrect format can all lead to a significant deterioration of the finished product and may render them unusable when it comes to the final production run.  This just underlines how important it is to make sure that everyone involved in the creation of your document knows what they are doing and what is expected from them as well as the consequences of missing deadlines.

You want to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to extracting all the sales juice from your marketing budget.

A picture paints a thousand words and there is no doubt that using pictures has a direct and positive impact on the sales success of marketing tools such as catalogs, newsletters, brochures or company magazines.

Creating good-looking and successful collateral is time-consuming and expensive if you are going to do the job right – it also takes time not only for a piece of work but for your overall repertoire of tools you will develop and use.

Catalogs for instance, are very heavy users of photos – and this is where customer seek to cut corners first and save money – this is where a catalog will either succeed and return profits or fail completely and lose the investment.  Do not scrimp on the photographs – take single product shots where possible and make the images as large as you can in the catalog – both directly increase sales.

You can save money by using images from your supplier or manufacturer – frequently these are excellent images for you to use, so always make sure you ask them if they have images you can use in your own publications. You not only want the images but you want them in the format your design partner can work with – for instance, images with clipping paths may be required; if they don’t have them you may end up with a higher design and preparation cost which loses you the money you save with a “free” image – act as liason between the design partner and the suppliers so everyone knows exactly what is required.

Many customers are web-based companies who grew from a web-site and have continued right on growing so there  is little to say where the “traditional” part of the business begins and the “web” business ends.  Frequently they have a stack of images which are used on the web but there are problems with low-resolution and these images simply cannot be used in a print-catalog – the end result will be blurred and there are also issues in handling them causing increased design team costs.

Clients also look to save money by taking the photographs themselves – a false economy on several levels.  Firstly, the cost of the shoot is about 30-35% of the image budget but is 100% important when it comes to the finished quality.  You simply cannot afford to end up with a set of bad product images and taking the shots is where the risk lies – hire a professional volume image provider and get the shots you really will need and the design team can use.