Image is everything in business and there are a million and one avenue’s to investigate that will further advance your success.
Whether it’s headed and continuous paper, A5 postcards for one off promotions or a compliments slip to add a personal touch, design and print is imperative to any business. Even a painter and decorator needs flyers and business cards to pop through prospective customer’s doors!
Surprisingly though most of us are far more capable than we think at learning the basics. If you’re a one-man-band or a relatively small business it can be a worthwhile exercise to book onto a short desktop publishing course to get yourself in touch with how things are created, not to mention the fact that in the future, it could save you some cash.
Most people are now equipped with a PC, and most of these have Microsoft Office installed including PowerPoint. This is a great place to start because although professional designers would not necessarily work with this package, you will find it surprisingly capable of producing eye-catching newsletters and flyers that you can easily get printed at one-stop print shops. If however you are looking for better results or artwork that needs to go to mass print and you intend to carry out the work yourself, then you really need to invest in an Apple Mac.
PCs are becoming more and more sophisticated but Macs still rule in the world of design and working with printers you will quickly find that they don’t take kindly to artwork created on PCs. There are those that will bend over backwards to oblige but it’s not the ideal. Some design software is available for both Mac and PC but the problems come because when you create work on a PC it will still normally have to cross platforms to a Mac and at this stage you could lose fonts and even certain page layout elements. This means a printer will have to fiddle with your creation to make it work on their system.
When it comes to software, Quark XPress is the design industry standard. A professional page layout programme with features that will handle virtually any pre-press circumstance, it is still surprisingly easy to use. Couple this with Adobe Photoshop, the well-known image editing program, and you will be pretty much set up to create anything yourself and send it over to your chosen printer with no hiccups.
Do be aware though that some printers might give you a hard time for attempting the design yourself, after-all they can earn more money by carrying out the work for you! The best thing to do is form a good relationship with your printer. Inform them confidently of what you intend to happen, find out the way they like to work and in what format, oblige and you’ll be laughing.
The same principles come into play when placing an advert with a newspaper. Find out the exact size of your advert (be aware that papers will often talk in ‘columns’) and ensure you know what file type they prefer to receive i.e.: PDF, Jpeg etc. and finally, ensure you get the artwork to them by deadline!
Your business will benefit from various types of printed material, many of which you might find you can produce yourself and lets face it, the more your company name is flashed about, the more your profile will be raised.
