When I open my mailbox there are oodles of direct mail pieces jammed in there. The ones that say dear resident or occupant are the first to get tossed. This is followed by the thousands of coupons. The last to hit the can are the direct mail pieces that have my name on them and look more official. Rarely, if ever have I received a direct mail postcard with my name peppered through the body. These catch my attention and for whoever sent the piece, that’s 90% of the battle. I remember getting mailing after mailing from a tree trimming/landscaping service that addressed each postcard with “dear occupant”. When I contacted them and demonstrated how easy and attractive is was to address, barcode, and sort for bulk all at the same time we’re printing the cards, they were impressed. We now do all their mailings and printing.

In summary, if you don’t have a direct mail campaign in place, you should. Offering new and existing customers added incentive (discount specials, yearend sales, creative services) can and will help grow your sales and help your bottom line.

In our ever evolving electronic world there are a few observations. Communication between vendors and customers has become less and less personal. With email, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, blogiing and all we never have to meet or see who is puchasing printing or placing an order. Call me old fashioned but I believe it’s important to visit, drop in, and sit down with your existing customers to say thank you and is there anything else you can help them with. Letting a business relationship get too impersonal almost encourages your customers to shop there business. It has always been my practice to occaissionally deliver a job to each customer and thank them for their business in person. I firmly believe that people like to see and speak with people they do business with.

I know that when one of my vendors stops in to see me our relationship gets that much stronger. While it’s very important to use modern technology to it’s fullest capability, it is equally to be a highly visible partner with your customers.

In a down economy it is vital to use all tools available to you for customer retention. Expanding your customer base is a tough task. Our success at DaVinci Graphics is in large part due to our personal handling of our customers. It is a ploicy that will be in place as long as we are in business.

As with any printing or manufacturing company, mistakes can be made. On average, the e-commerce printing companies accept a 12% rejection rate so, you have a 12% chance of a mistake in your printing order. Small businesses like us, DaVinci Graphics, take our customers and their jobs and make sure they are done to the customers satisfaction. We make sure it is done right the first time. While no one is perfect, I have a hard time remembering any final product that the customer has not been satisfied with. If it was the case, we take care of it by reprinting at little to no cost or compromising on what needs to be done. In a tight market, made worse by the recession, its very hard to recover from projects that need to be rerun. In an economy where one is trying to manage costs, a redo of a project can be devastating. There is just no margin for error. Let's say your net profit margin is 5%, after costs. If a job s done wrong and let's say it "costs," $200.00 to redo it. To recoup the $200.00 in profit, you must do $4000.00 in sales. For a small business, it's very hard to absorb this kind of blow.

The main point is "communicate, communicate, communicate." This is how the small businessman can stay one step ahead of the economy. Talk to your customers. Advise them on how to save money while still delivering the piece they want. Lastly, send proofs for everything. Content, color, binding, paper stock, anything that pertains to the project being created. Remember the customer is key. Keep them pleased and clearly demonstrate the value you can add to the job and you will have them forever.

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Web Typography

Web typography has been beaten to a pulp in discussion, techniques, blogs, magazines, the world over, so it is no ground breaking subject. Web design and web sites can be works of art and it’s a shame to see the same six or seven fonts used over and over again. Granted, fonts like Helvetica and Times New Roman are standard for a reason, they are beautiful, but branding and design is choked back by this limitation and design concepts aren’t able to flourish into the would-be-beauty’s that they potentially could be. But, there are ground breaking things going on in the industry that make web typography a hot topic for the future.

@font-face seems to be all the new rage, with sites like Typekit pioneering the art of font replacement in css styles. Yet, there are still a few kinks that need to be worked out with this technique. Number one, standard fonts, that are used just as often as Times New Roman and Helvetica, like Garamond and Univers, can not be embedded into the @font-face replacement. I am not quite sure the reasons behind this, probably licensing and legal issues, but until I can use Trade Gothic Condensed Bold No. Twenty for my h2 tags, @font-face fails to satisfy my typographic hunger in web design. A

Another reason I hesitate to incorporate @font-face into my designs is that it uses JavaScript to embed the fonts. This is no different from any other font replacement technique on the web right now. The drawback to using JavaScript for typography is that some people don’t enable JavaScript on their browsers. It pains me to use this as a reason but, until JavaScript becomes a household name, @font-face and Cufon cease to solve the problem.

Cufon is another clever, “almost there”, font-replacement technique that is on the brink of being what I am looking for. It also uses JavaScript but in a different way. It uses selectors to replace that text with rendered images of the embedded font. Unlike @font-face, Cufon allows any TrueType font to be used to replace text. Downsides? Yes, it’s not all peachy. The image replacement technique has a few quirks that are hard to work around. Line-height becomes and issue when using Cufon. Some fonts don’t allow for the adjustment of line-height in the CSS styles, and when you are using Cufon to make the typography on your site impeccable, it’s impossible when the line-height doesn’t respond to your styling. Another drawback is link rollovers don’t respond to Cufon targeted selectors. This doesn’t bode well for a sweet navigation menu using Swiss 71a with a hover effect and the hover effect doesn’t appear.

There are more image replacement scripts out there and tons of free @font-face fonts out there to use but they all have their similar degrees of issues. An idea for the future is to maybe have an online foundry of fonts that designers can draw from and when a user visits their site, it activates that font. Sounds similar to Typekit right? Well, maybe use php instead of JavaScript to send the activation back and forth. Or, browsers allow designers to include a font in their directory and that font becomes activated on a visitors computer when visiting a particular site. Both of the suggestions for the future are vague and not researched but until JavaScript is eliminated, and new web safe fonts become available, web typography will be a battle for every designers in the future.

Social Media

Another aspect of web design that has been revolutionized in the past decade is social media. Everyone is online and on Facebook and/or Twitter. They have become an integral part of social and professional communication. Every respectable business tweets and has a facebook fan page, and don’t forget about a domain name. So why so many different places for relatively the same thing? It’s a good question. The future holds an exciting possibility that Smashing Magazine recently wrote an article about. Holistic Web Browsing is a unique idea that holds a lot of weight.

As far as one person having a hundred different places to find information about them, what if one site was like a personal url where all of that information could be pulled in by an API or similar source. Instead of going to facebook, LinkedIN, Flickr, Twitter, Last.FM… you get the point, you got to www.facebook.com/uniqueid and boom, there it is. Everything you used to have to look for across plethora’s of social sites is now in one convenient location. This is not to say facebook and twitter become insignificant in the future, well maybe a little, but like any revolutionary web based application, it always takes a little while to catch on and never completely eliminates the competition. People would still be able to access their info on other sites and not even use them if they wanted, this site would be a sort of yellow pages for the internet.

Holistic Web Browsing

Keeping with the Holistic Web Browsing idea in mind, what if web browsers became the operating system for your computer. The web is becoming faster and more powerful everyday. You can run apps from it and access it from a cell phone on a subway in Timbuktu. So what if it became the source of everything you do on your computer, and instead of having a tab open for each different window, your desktop background would just be the Google homepage. I think that would be a good look. Regardless, instead of having a bookmark bar and a thousand tabs open on your browser, url’s would run as applications from your desktop just as your Mac Mail does when you click on it. It would be the same size but now, going back to that yellow pages of the internet idea, you could find every email address you ever wanted to find would be right in your contacts. Every Photoshop action or illustrator brush you used to download from the web would now be already installed.

Yes, it’s a delusion of grandeur and seems a little impossible but, hey, it’s the future.

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• 1. In 2003-04 digital color outsold film cameras.
• 2. 2006-07, more color prints were being made at retail stores than at home on a color printer.
• 3. 2008-09, Polaroid Cameras were discontinued and Kodak no longer made Kadachrome film (Sorry Paul Simon).

As a matter of fact, there are over 10 billion color photos on Facebook alone. People not only want color on their site, but also want color photo albums* of their families and friends. With the new digital technology this is easily accomplished. Yes, entire photo albums with personalized color covers are on the uprise. What does this mean? People(consumers) want color in everything they do and they want to reproduce it in calendars, photo albums, and framed photos. Still, color applications go far beyond this.

With the new XMPie software, printers can now send out direct mail pieces which are addressed and personalized to the person who’s attention you are trying to capture. With an InDesign plug-in, digital printers can not only place the address and the name of the person it is aimed towards, but it can also swap graphics for each mail piece depending on the addressees profile.

This one-to-one in one marketing is a powerful tool and is outgrowing all other sources of advertising. Confused? Well let’s say you want to get your company’s info in front of the head of marketing at ABC Hospital. A direct mail piece is sent out to this this person with the individuals name and profile specific graphics tailored to that person. An incentive is introduced to have this person log onto your website where you begin to glean information on your prospective customer, from the “matrix” of data collected. When the prospective customer logged in, how deep did they go? What items or articles did they click on and read? Now you have real useful data. The response rate to these direct mail pieces (personalized print jobs) is 5x to 10x higher than a generic mail piece and about the same price. Now you’ve established a direct line of communication with the potential customer. You have added value to your print project by making it a dynamic marketing material that you can track and glean information from.

Overall, direct mail marketing and one-to-one in one marketing is a valuable tool for businesses who want to target specific markets where their product or service is most useful.

For more information on one-to-one in marketing: to increase sales and your bottom line, contact us at Davinci Graphics.

Often times printers, like ourselves, can assume that everyone knows that printing business language. We take for granted that we can talk this way amongst ourselves and expect a fellow printer to understand us. For the average joe, some of these terms may be foreign. Therefore, this post will act as a constantly updated, compiled list of terms that we printer’s use from time to time in daily discussion.

Bleed

Printing. (of printed matter) to run off the edges of a page, either by design or through mutilation caused by too close trimming.

Dots

Printing. an individual element in a halftone reproduction.

Gutter

the white space formed by the inner margins of two facing pages in a bound book, magazine, or newspaper.

Imposition

The arrangement of page plates in proper order on a press for printing a signature.

Margin

The space around the printed or written matter on a page.

Offset

A process in which a lithographic stone or metal or paper plate is used to make an inked impression on a rubber blanket that transfers it to the paper being printed, instead of being made directly on the paper.

Pantone

A set of standard colors for printing, each of which is specified by a single number. You can buy a Pantone swatch book containing samples of each color. Some computer graphics software allows colors to be specified as Pantone numbers. Even though a computer monitor can only show an approximation to some of the colors, the software can output a color separation for each different Pantone color, enabling a print shop to exactly reproduce the original desired color.

Press Check

As soon as the ink is up to run-specifications, the pressman will pull a sheet for you to look at, approve and probably sign off on.

Process

is a subtractive color model, used in color printing, also used to describe the printing process itself. CMYK refers to the four inks used in most color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black

Proof

a. a trial impression, as of composed type, taken to correct errors and make alterations.
b. one of a number of early and superior impressions taken before the printing of the ordinary issue: to pull a proof.

Spot Color

is a specially mixed ink using in printing. Spot color inks come in a rainbow of colors, including some specialty inks such as metallic and fluorescent.

Spread

Two facing pages, as of a newspaper, magazine, or book.

Varnish

A preparation consisting of resinous matter, as copal or lac, dissolved in an oil (oil varnish)  or in alcohol (spirit varnish) or other volatile liquid. When applied to the surface of wood, metal, etc., it dries and leaves a hard, more or less glossy, usually transparent coating.