What is the best way to reach your audience and create a relationship with them?

 

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Direct response lists are populated with eople who have responded favorably to offers. Your job is to find people who ave responded to offers similar to yours. Beyond that, you should narrow your arch even further by using geo-demographics and other information often rovided with rental lists; this allows you to try to match your customer profile.

 

Clients rarely see thumbnails. They provide such little information it's difficult for many people to visualize what a finished product will look like. Or the designer may want to make the first layout a client sees as polished as possible.

 

The next step is called a rough although it may contain all the necessary elements in the design, including the copy. Some designers will include the photos or illustrations to be used. Others wait to scan in photos and simply mark out the locations of the pictures, rather than including them in the layout at this stage. The rough layout may be as elaborate or elementary as the designer decides to make it. A designer may be reluctant to spend too much time on finishing touches if he or she thinks the client is likely to make changes.

 

 

 

 

If you do the designs yourself, you should use thumbnails and preliminary computer designs to experiment and refine your ideas. The next stage in the design will depend upon the client's reaction to the rough. If the layout is acceptable, the designer may prepare finished computer artwork. If changes are requested, the designer will simply modify the rough for approval. Sometimes an intermediate design, called a comp, for comprehensive layout, is produced between the rough and the finished artwork.

 

Comps are a holdover from the time before all design work was done on computers. Designers drew comprehensive layouts, using colored markers, to approximate what the finished, printed material would look like. Today a comp may be a black and white laser output of the design, including photos, illustrations, headlines, and body copy, dressed up with colored markers to show how ink colors will be used.

 

The purpose of the comp stage is to give clients an inexpensive but relatively accurate look at what the advertising materials will look like when printed. A laser-printed comp may also serve as the final layout for proofreading. When a layout is approved and proofread, the designer sends it to a print shop either via data transfer on a modem or by delivering the artwork on a computer disk cartridge.

 

As examples throughout this book show, you can create effective direct mail and print advertising without photos and with minimal, if any, illustrations. To-day, however, visual elements to attract the eye are so important that you should use artwork whenever you can afford it. Photographs help sell products better than drawings, but drawings are sometimes easier to obtain and use.

 

Further stages in production are reviewed in other sections. Now comes a look at each component of a design.

 

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