Creative Self Promotion II

One of our most-recently-booked freelancers, John, stopped by today to show me his newly minted self-mailer. John’s piece exhibits a great deal of creativity while maintaining interest (folks can hang up the poster as art-work) and sensitivity to cost-effective mailing by producing the piece in a size slightly smaller than the traditional 8.5 X 11.

Check out some photos below John’s thought process behind the piece…though my photography hardly does the piece justice you’ll get the idea. The metallic red cannot really be appreciated but the piece came to about $1.50/unit for fullfillment and that certainly can be appreciated!

John provided some insight into his design process for the piece:

1.) He wanted something neat that wouldn’t be thrown away. Size always helps with that factor, as does special inks… and if it’s going to hang around for a bit, it needs to act as a sales piece but also do more than that. This pushed him toward a poster concept.

2.) It needed to be small enough to hand out or mail, so a fold-out poster made sense. John selected 8×10 as the fold-down size as it fits nicely in a 9×12 mailer and you can easily pick up 16×20 frames at a store.

3.) He wanted something that was cool and well designed, but not something that was over-designed.

4.) Preferably, John wanted something that had a unit cost similar to that of a cup of coffee. John’s thought process was if he was too frugal he might lose impact. Also, he felt that if it came across like he was trying to save money on design and printing how in the world could he ask his clients to spend extra to get cooler print or web options? When figuring what to measure the cost against as a guideline, a cup of coffee seemed like the best compromise to John.  He should be happy to invite any prospective customer out for Starbucks, no matter what their budget is or how hard it might be to get he work, a latte is the great equalizer.

Kudos, John!

Tags: self-promotion

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Design Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.