“Work-and-turn? Work-and-tumble?” What is this, a circus?  Come jump on board the lingo train if you want to know what’s what. Here are some printing terms that seem to come from another world:

Bleeds - when printing extends all the way to the edge of the paper, as in “the ink bleeds off the sheet.” A job that bleeds can cost you more because the printer must print an oversized sheet and trim it to the final size. The bleed region prevents unsightly white lines along the edges of your piece..

Choke - to reduce a printing image slightly so you don’t have a darker overlapped border on a lighter background.

Creep - also called “push out,” it happens when the middle pages of a folded signature extend a little bit beyond the outside pages. Your printer has to compensate for it during layout and imposition. Otherwise you’ll be stuck with a little creep. And who needs that?

Dummy - a preliminary mock-up of the final piece, showing images and text. Sometimes it’s just blank pages of paper, made up in advance to simulate the final size and format of a print project.

Hickeys - these are small spots or imperfections that occasionally show up in printing, due to dirt on the press. Hickeys are bad news no matter where they show up.

Kiss Cut - a diecut that just barely cuts through the paper. This is commonly used for labels to cut the custom label but leave the backer uncut.

Moiré -  an undesirable pattern caused by incorrect screen angles for printed colors that might make you think your vision’s in trouble.

Scum - a film of ink printing in the non-image areas of a plate where it shouldn’t print.

Verso is the left-hand and Recto is the right-hand page of a book or magazine. 

Web Printing - Web presses are massive presses used to print jobs from rolls (or webs) of paper, as opposed to paper precut into sheets.

Oh, and what about work-and-turn and work-and-tumble? Each of these terms refer to methods of reducing printing costs by using a single set of plates to print both sides of a piece.

I have only scratched the surface here with these definitions. For definitions from “A” to “Z”, check out the glossary of printing terms at PaperSpecs.com. This site is a great resource when it comes to paper and printing on paper.

During this period, paper usage has dropped dramatically with USPS statistics showing a 5.8 percent drop in postal volume weight of all Standard-A mail. This leaves one to wonder why the laws of supply and demand have not caused a drop in paper prices. 

In an article on the PaperSpecs website, Jim Duffy, president of Alonzo Printing Co. in Hayward, California reported “The universal driver of the price increase is exorbitant cost increases for energy, transportation, pulp and other fiber. This doesn’t even include the chemicals required to produce paper such as starch, most of which are under water in the Midwest causing paper manufacturers to scramble for substitutes. The paper industry is indeed facing some very tough times.”

With the costs of producing and delivering paper in an increasing spiral, what can you do to keep your costs down.

First, work with your designer and printer to specify a paper that meets the design specifications but comes from a mill that is located close to the printer to reduce transportation costs.

Second, have your designer work with the printer early in the design process to maximize your paper usage by sizing your piece to best utilize the paper sheet with minimal waste. This may involve a slightly smaller size. Printing on a sheet with a lower basis weight also can reduce costs. Consult with your designer about the benefits and trade-offs of using a lighter sheet.

Third, reduce unnecessary quantity by scrubbing your databases and mailing lists to avoid sending multiple pieces to one address, or to unoccupied addresses. Have the mail services provider process your list through delivery point validation (DPV) and through the national change of address (NCOA). The service fee can be recovered quickly by reducing print quantities and eliminating additional postage charges.

September is Rotary Literacy Month. We invite you to support literacy while receiving professional marketing and communication design services that will build value for you and your customer. We will donate 10% of all project revenues ordered by September 30, 2008 to the Rotary Club of St. George in support of the Rotary dictionary project. This project distributes dictionaries to all third grade students in Washington County.

The goal of the dictionary project is to assist all students in completing the school year as good writers, active readers and creative thinkers by providing students with their own personal dictionary. The dictionaries are a gift to each student to use at school and at home for years to come. 

Our goal is to provide the Rotary Club with $2,500, enough money to provide approximately 1,400 dictionaries to Washington County third grade students.

Reading is the most important skill of all. It is the starting point for all the economic and social opportunities this world has to offer. Educators see third grade as the dividing line between learning to read and reading to learn.

Rotary is a worldwide organization of business and professional leaders that provides humanitarian service, encourages high ethical standards in all vocations, and helps build goodwill and peace in the world. To learn more about Rotary International or to get involved with a club near you, visit the Rotary International website.

We invite you to help the Rotary Club of St. George to provide Washington County children the benefits of owning their own personal dictionary. Support literacy and receive professional marketing and communication design services that will build value for you and your customer.

“83% [of consumers] trust a company more if it is socially and/or enviromentally responsible,” according to a 2007 Cone Consumer Environmental Survey. A BusinessWeek survey showed that “Consumers are 66% more likely to purchase a product if they believe the company is environmentally conscious.”

With growing demand for environmentally friendly goods and services, many companies have developed cost-effective ways of improving their environmental performance and the environmental performance of their offerings. Unfortunately, some companies engage in a practice that has become known as greenwashing — using creative advertising to appear environmentally friendly without making the investment to provide more environmentally friendly goods and services.

The practice appears to be growing and purchasers are learning that they must carefully examine all environmental claims to ensure the environmental benefits they seek are reflected in the products and services they buy.

To avoid being guilty of greenwashing, be sure your marketing does not use one of these greenwashing “sins”:

1. Sin of Fibbing

2. Sin of Unsubstantiated Claims — ”Just trust us” isn’t going to cut it. Don’t use words like “green” or “eco” in your corporate or product names and hope no one asks for details.

3. Sin of Irrelevance — If it has been legally banned for years, it isn’t relevant.

4. Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off — All around gains in environmental friendliness are key. Focus on all aspects of how your product/service can be more friendly.

5. Sin of Vagueness — Be specific about what you are doing. 

6. Sin of Relativism — Make sure your claims really matter — that they are relevant. If your product is best in it’s class, but a different class is more appropriate, it isn’t environmentally friendly.

You can read more about Greenwashing at Paperspecs.com.

However, when done incorrectly, email marketing can be destructive, erode brand equity, and turn your happy clients into unhappy ex-clients. Since the goal of all marketing efforts is to attract interest and build a desire to purchase your products or services, it is important that e-mail marketing incorporate best practices — practices that will lead to sales.

To help you make sure your e-mail marketing campaigns conform to best practices, I am attaching a white paper that outlines making sure your campaign does not fall short. The white paper was published by iContact, an excellent e-mail marketing management service which I use in managing my clients e-mail campaigns.

Email_Marketing_Best_Practices_iContact.pdf

Although these two traits might seem to address the same issue, they actually are different. Legibility refers to the design of the typeface, while readability refers to how the typeface is set.

The factors that affect legibility include x-height, character shapes, stroke contrast, the size of its counters, and weight. All of these factors relate to the ability to differentiate one letter from another. This is an extremely important consideration in text designs where a more legible a typeface holds the reader’s attention for a longer time.

A display typeface may have a poor legibility, but in the small number of words for which it is used, it is meant to convey a mood or a feeling. In these cases, legibility may not be important.

Figure 1. ITC Johann Sparking, a powerful handwriting design, is not the most legible of typefaces, especially when set for blocks of copy in small sizes, but its readability increases when set larger for just a couple of words. From the Gettysburg Address.

When setting type, a designer must adjust size, line spacing, letter spacing, words spacing, line length, and alignment. If the type is poorly set then even a legible typeface can be made unreadable. Conversely, a typeface with low legibility can be made more readable through careful typesetting.

Figure 2. Even a legible typeface, such as ITC Flora, can lose readability when set too large with a tight line-spacing. Readability is further hindered by the relatively short line length due to the large size. By setting the type smaller with more line spacing, readability is dramatically improved. From Peter Pan by J. Barrie.

Before the advent of desktop publishing tools, type was set by a specialist called a typesetter. These people understood all of the rules necessary to make sure that type was properly set to maximize readability and in the selection of appropriately legible type. It is now important that your designer understand these same skills so that your message is read and not discarded in frustration.

Read “Type Talk: Say What?” at CreativePro.com

Your ideal target may be making dinner, talking with his or her spouse, or cleaning the house as your ad airs. Your direct mail piece may be set aside and only passively viewed. These are important considerations during the creative process.

ALL MARKETING is subject to the circumstances your target audience may be experiencing as they view your message. These circumstances will likely dilute the effectiveness or responsiveness of your piece. To counteract this, it is important to think about how they will interact with your ad or mailing package during the development.

Make sure that the most important point has prominence, and that it will draw them in. Don’t overwhelm them with too much to look at. The more time it will take to review the piece, the more likely that the majority of your target audience will tune out your advertisement or set your direct mail piece aside — later to be dropped in the waste basket. 

Also, remember that “Once, Twice, Three Times a Customer!” For maximum success, campaigns are necessary for maximum returns. Each contact builds brand recognition and reminds them that you exist until they are ready to buy.

Don’t forget to continue marketing to your current customers. Once you have a customer, keep selling him or her something! The best prospect is a satisfied customer.

To achieve success, keep it relevant, keep it simple, engage the audience — REPEATEDLY — and make it easy for them to respond or get more information.

Great marketing is visceral and then supported by facts. To craft a message that will achieve results, use the following formula: 

1. State the biggest BENEFIT (not feature)
2. Define the problem and show your solution
3. Support the claim and make the offer
4. Give value to the benefits
5. Show the results
6. Build credibility
7. Minimize or eliminate the risk
8. Create an urgency to respond
9. Ask for immediate and decisive action
10. Repeat the offer or the biggest benefit (or both) and request action again

Your marketing will be most successful when you creat a connection between a problem your potential customer wants to solve and your product — a connection they can feel. 

Think about the last time you purchased a computer. On the box was a list of features that read something like this: 3.2 MHz Intel Core2 Dou Processor, 2 Gb RAM, 320 Gb Hard Drive, DVD-R, etc.

Unless you are a computer geek, most of these numbers may not even mean anything to you, except, perhaps that they sound really big. What every user does want to know is how those features are going to benefit them. Think of the marketing for Apple® computers, iPod®, and iPhone®.

It is the power of FEELING that will draw the customer in to your message so that you can support that feeling with facts. This is why features don’t sell products — benefits do.

If you think VDP means a mailing that simply mentions a person’s name, think again. VDP has come a long way since the “Dear [Name]” mail-pieces of the last 20 years. By knowing a little about the consumer’s purchasing history, successful VDP can create customized messaging for print, personalized Web pages, e-mail campaigns and mobile phone offers.

“Anyone can do a mailing with custom labels and addresses,” said Adobe Certified Expert, Kelly McCathran, who spoke at a Webinar sponsored by the Printing Industries of Northern California (PINC).

The key to successful VDP is two-fold. First, you must have a database. The more information you have about your contacts, the more customization can be made to your piece. Data for VDP can be collected from many sources including mailings, business cards and from Web sites and surveys. Once the data is collected, the magic rests in the hands — and mind — of a skilled designer. The unique part is — and this is where design is so important — the personalization has to skillfully and subtly become part of the message.

For example, let’s imagine a company that sells uniforms and has a database that includes the names of high school coaches, their teams colors, demographics about the racial make-up of their school, and other information. The designer of their catalog can utilize this information to automatically swap the photos to include players that fit their racial make-up and all the uniforms would be in the team colors. Perhaps the team name even appears on the uniforms. Finally, a personalized ordering URL is created with the coaches name.

When McCathran describes the effectiveness of VDP, she says it’s like “shooting 1 or 100,00 arrows from a single bow simultaneously and having each one hit its intended, separate target.”

The options for VDP systems range from small copier-like devices to full blown digital presses and the quality of digital equipment is continually improving and the cost is dropping. McCathran points out “More people are going to be making the decision to do shorter runs,” she says adding, “we’re already seeing that now — digital printing with as good quality [as offset] without having to run plates.”

With higher response rates and the ability to target your message to the reader — reducing waste — VDP is a marketing tool that can no longer be ignored.

To work around this limitation and to incorporate non-standard fonts into their website, many designers have resorted to a variety of workarounds. These have included: replacing HTML text with graphics, replacing entire Web pages with PDF or Flash, and using CSS font family selectors to inform the browser of a series of font choices. 

Each of these techniques has one major flaw. None of them safely render live HTML text in a non-standard font. This limits the ability of search engines to index the content of a site and reduces the ability of people to find the content.

This is what made me so excited to learn about a new method that has recently come on the scene — sIFR, which stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (after original creator Shaun Inman). sIFR replaces HTML text on the fly with dynamically generated Flash text. In other words: your site uses plain old HTML text but visitors see Flash text. It works through CSS selectors (tags used to describe what the text is).

sIFR can be used to style headings, captions, navigation items, and even short paragraph text like block quotes, pull quotes, or what have you — but it wouldn’t be practical to use this technology to style entire pages of text. It provides an elegant method for customizing the look of web pages while keeping the content accessible to search engines.