Postcard Self Promotion
jjohnson1032 (68 pencils) | Thu, 2011-12-22 14:38
This is the front of a flier I want to hand out to potential clients. The rear of the card would contain more copy and price points for printing, along with contact information. My plan is to print it on 4x6 14pt with spot coating on the logo, the eyes and maybe the lips. My target audience is African American businesses in my community who would like high quality printing but don't believe they can afford it. A lot of business in my community normally don't set aside money for marketing and design because they 1 don't see the benefit in spending the money, and 2 they believe it is too costly. I've found a very good printer willing to give me more than reasonable printing costs that I will pass on to my clients.
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I don't know how i feel about the spot coating on only the eyes and lips. I might go for the whole face if it's not too costly. Your images are high quality and your composition is respectable. I might touch up the face around the lips, chin and nose a bit more in Photoshop, but not too much. Also, I would take the word printing and scoot it up closer to pinx, they feel a little disjointed. Good work!
Thank you, what would you do around the lips chin and nose?
Just do the lips & logo if anything. The "printing" in Pinx printing looks like an afterthought, not part of the logo. I'd put that word in a narrow box that's level to the descender line in PINX.
You know your market, but the whole thing seems kind of inappropriate for a professional printer. This ad looks like it's for a beauty salon.
Looking at it technically, doing that moire pattern with a CMYK brown background is going be messy for any printer without excellent registration.
You are right, I do need to work on the word printing a little. You don't think the brown background will print correctly? What about a digital printer? Or should I just make it a solid color?
What I mean is that brown uses all 4 inks, and if any of them is a little out of register you get a dot pattern around the edges. Combine that with the very fine lines in your background, and the whole thing might look grainy or fuzzy. Doesn't mean you can't do it, just that the pressman has to be spot on. Using less complex fine patterns or solid waves would be safer.
Thanks I don't know how spot on my pressman is honestly, so I'm going to play it safe.
"Pinx printing" doesn't feel like it's working as the same unit. I'm not sure if you're set on your tagline yet or if it is a tagline but (a.) sexy is subjective (b.) sounds like you're printing porn magazines.
I might either enlarge the picture or shrink it just a bit to bring the eyes away from the edge and mouth closer to, eyes typically capture our focus so to have it leading nearly off the card where your information isn't located isn't as useful as it could be in terms of hierarchy.
I'll leave my last thought for others to possibly chime in on as well, are you wanting white business as well? Some may look at that card and be completely turned off because of their own belief systems. Is there no other cultural way to speak to African's without literally making it "black"? I've even known people to become offended because there's all of a sudden imagery "for them" and no one else. I'm not suggesting you stick a white person in there or replace it with any other race but integrating her with a more typical background/ sidewalk/ cityscape might help take the focus off of brown/ black colours only and help her look more naturalized. Might just be me, but long and short there's too much brown in the palette here for the soul focus of speaking to a different race.
Sexy is subjective, and I'm not committed to it. Originally I wanted to use beautiful, which I still might. You are right about the eyes being near the edge. I don't want to exclude any particular race, though most of my clients are black. Perhaps it may be too much brown idk. But I want to use all black models for the time being.
I'd for sure use the word beautiful in place of sexy. I regularly hear that the printing quality is beautiful, but I'm hard pressed to recall when it was called sexy. No need to replace the race of the model at all, that's more than fine but I think the background needs to show a more realistic setting rather than a further dark palette. I'll agree with MrC, the reproduction of the fractal moiré will be challenging and doesn't really add to anything specifically here. If you're selling your service to professions who know quality, this could be a bonus if done right because people know the difficulties of printing such patterns well but otherwise I wouldn't put too much stock into it.
I agree with Mara, I'd actually probably blush at the least if my girlfriend saw that on my desk, and that's even if she didn't even find issue with it. It's more sexual than printing at the moment and something a bit more innocent (or male) may help to extinguish worries like that.
printing and the tag need to be more sexy and visible because it's like made by MS Powerpoint.
yes I'm brazilian xD
I'm sorry, but this looks like a promo for an "outcall service" or something else sexual. The lighter part of the acvround even looks like a negligee. How many businessMEN are going to want their wives to see this on their desks when they come to visit? That's just one way in which this might backfire on you as a community-based theme. If you want to use a black model, I think a sweet child (boy or girl, or both) would be more appropriate.
Might just be how your design looks on my iPhone, but "PINX" looks bitmappy. Is that because it suggests pinking shears? If so, why the sewing analogy? I know the Creative Bits logo uses the bitmap theme to advantage, but I don't see that advantage here.
I agree, "printing" needs to be much more prominent. But what about your design services? I assume you're not just a print broker. Because if you're relying on this one printer you found who will give you printed by any one of several online "gang shops" at a cost of 1,000 pieces for under $50, including the spot varnish. All they need is a computer and the artwork. Most of those potential clients would get tripped up by the "and the artwork" part, though not all. I would make this service more prominent, is you are indeed providing it.
If you use a beautiful woman model, people will assume, as I did, that she is you. That, again, gets back to the idea that you are selling sex.
Mara
Pinx is bitmappy, because it stands for pixels and ink. My aim isn't sexual just beautiful, and what is more beautiful than a woman. I want risque but not too sexual. Not really worried about the wives of the business men. I am working on the logo and the tag to make it seem more integrated. All of the cards will feature a beautiful women.
I see. But do you think that using a pixelated font will work best for you, without the stylish exaggeration of the pixel effect that makes the CreativeBits logo work? CreativeBits' mark is the merest suggestion of C and B, not literally a C and B in a font that looks like something from a 1980s spreadsheet. I think you're sending out a mixed message with this pixelated "PINX" and suggest that you sketch out some other ways to incorporate the pixels + ink idea. While you're at it, perhaps you could try a color other than pink for the word PINX. It adds another layer of possible interpretation that could detract from the core meaning. Perhaps you could sample the model's eye color and use that.
You may be withholding some vital information about your target market that would change my mind if you filled us in, but right now, I think you are really on shaky ground with this whole risqué thing. It just comes across as cheesy.
Mara
logo comment appreciated, I didn't even notice the Creative Bits logo. I will sketch some more ideas.
My aim with the target market as I said before are small business owners who don't buy design services or use cheap ones to save money. I notice in my neighborhood a lot of business print things themselves from Microsoft Publisher usually in black and white, or they use printers who allow them to print pixelated images and just bad work in general. The only good print and design I see usually comes from club fliers. which are scattered everywhere. I kinda gave up on doing design for a while until recently people started coming to me without me doing any solicitation, and I'm starting to get referrals so they want promotion cards which I never bothered to create for myself before. I'm not the best designer, I am still learning (slowly) but I make sure everything I make is of high print quality, no fuzzy or bad images and I try my best to make sure client is satisfied or I don't charge them. and until I get better I'm sure to undercharge them anyway.
I'm pretty stuck on the beautiful model thing for personal reasons. Its supposed to be more artistic than sexual. The idea was to make a somewhat goddess of print, which is why I changed her eye color to a rainbow color. I wanted to add more print elements to her but it just started to look cluttered and messy, I chose a black model because of the rich brown color of her skin tone and I want to see more beautiful blacks in media and print.
I've reconsidered the logo a little. I know there are hundreds of companies using pixels and ink for design name, I wanted to mix them together and came up with pinx, my former name fusion, was nixed because everyone had that name two. Pinx stand for pixels and ink, so I wanted something that referenced the two words visually, and the color pink was chosen because pinx sounds like pink. How about this alternative for the logo? the square is supposed to represent a pixel while the standard serif font represents print.
This is a vast improvement. I doubt most people -- not even designers -- would get "pixels and ink" out of this. Pixels are only valid for raster imagery, which is only a part of what we do with artwork that's to be printed. And of course, when a job goes to press, the matrix is dots, not pixels.
Probably everything I've been saying so far boils down to getting a better "read" on your target market and communicating more clearly, more directly, with them about what your services are and how they can help to make their businesses more successful. I think you're so focused on what pleases YOU that you're missing the point of what your outgoing message should be.
Mara
your original logo looks better. this looks like a GAP-ed version of your logo.
The services and prices were going to go on the back, though I guess I could add some bullet points to the front as well.
the girl doesnt look sexy or beautiful to me. she looks scared.
and i think the bitmapped logo suits the situation fine.
Late to the game here - but I'll add my 2 cents anyway...
Like the idea of "pinx" - however it does come off as some kind of sex-related business... especially with a hot young woman in the picture. If you switch to this new "pixel logo" - at least make the pixel a perfect square.
So far as the original post - it's a hard piece to print. The moire pattern in the background will cause registration problems (as already noted) and brown is a hard color to reproduce accurately anyway. You would definitely want to run it on a regular offset press - not a duplex machine or something - and you would need to be there when they ran it to check the color.
Concerning the original image - it has nothing to do with graphics or printing. The girl is sexy (and "sexy" used to be a term people would use for just about anything) - but it's just not appropriate. I think you could get away with just the eyes - do the color spectrum in her eyes and use them cropped to fill the page. The entire right side of the page is basically wasted space anyway. Get a close up of the eyes and it would make a bolder, more appropriate piece.
As always though - that is... jmho.
Is PINX really the name of the printer? No matter what you do with this, it will always have an escort service, sex shop, strip club feel about it. You could set those letters in Hobo on an image of an Alaskan grizzly bear fishing for salmon and the audience will still think it's an ad for especially naughty grizzly bears who fish for salmon in especially naughty ways.
Without my sense of direction, I don't know where I'd be.