http://www.designisaboutyou.com at Bright Ideas Graphic Design, we believe great design is about your success Tue, 17 Feb 2009 02:33:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I am occasionally reminded that the terms that I use regularly as a designer and print buyer, while familiar to me, are not always familiar to you, my client. I feel it an important responsibility as your marketing partner to educate you about them as this knowledge helps you to ... http://www.designisaboutyou.com/2008/09/10/printing_terms/ Have you noticed your cost to print your marketing prices has been increasing? This is, in part, due to almost continuously rising paper costs. Most common paper stocks have risen as much as 10 percent in the first two quarters of 2008 with another increase of up to 10 percent ... http://www.designisaboutyou.com/2008/09/02/keep_paper_costs_down/ 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 ... http://www.designisaboutyou.com/2008/08/26/bright-ideas-donating-to-support-literacy/   “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 ... http://www.designisaboutyou.com/2008/08/05/greenwashing-is-bad-business/ E-mail marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to contact prospects and customers. It’s benefits include that it is cheaper than traditional bulk mail and that it promotes communication between the buyer and seller. In many cases, e-mail marketing can have a much larger impact on immediate sales ... http://www.designisaboutyou.com/2008/06/20/e-mail-marketing-best-practices-for-success/ A recent article on a trade blog that I subscribe to addressed the issues of legibility and readability in type. These are important factors when designing any marketing materials. They can be extremely critical in the successful communication of the message. Although these two traits might seem to address the same ... http://www.designisaboutyou.com/2008/06/12/is-type-driving-your-audience-away/ If you want your direct marketing piece to pull in buckets of leads and fatten your wallet, it is important to remember this simple rule: YOUR MARKETING PIECE IS NOT GOING TO BE PRESENTED IN AN IDEAL SETTING. Your ideal target may be making dinner, talking with his or her spouse, ... http://www.designisaboutyou.com/2008/06/06/your-marketing-not-in-a-lab/ Great salespeople don’t sell products, they sell the way the product makes the customer feel, or how it will improve their life. In other words, great sales people sell benefits, not features. This is an important rule to remember when designing marketing materials. Great marketing is visceral and then supported by ... http://www.designisaboutyou.com/2008/06/05/features-don%e2%80%99t-sell-%e2%80%94-benefits-do/ Research shows that static mail-piece response rates are about 1-2 percent. Variable Data Publishing (VDP) claims an 8 percent response and higher. Using specific consumer preference data, VDP can be an effective way to produce unique targeted communications that capture attention and inspire a customer to respond. If you think VDP ... http://www.designisaboutyou.com/2008/06/04/improving-direct-mail-results-with-variable-data/ It use to be, that the font used on your website had to be installed on the user's computer. This left web designers with only a few fonts to use that were consistent across systems. The number of common fonts has grown from three to about a dozen in recent ... http://www.designisaboutyou.com/2008/05/28/sifr-custom-fonts-for-plain-old-html-text/