Blake Echols, Senior Graphic Designer
Get a briefing on design best practices for direct marketing fundraising. Blake will share pointers on design elements to keep in mind, direct mail and digital requirements to adhere to, and how to effectively convey your visual creative concepts.
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Introduction
I am Blake Echols, Senior Designer.
I’ve been at Avalon since 2013,
I oversee all of the in-house design at Avalon.
We are on pace for nearly 300 projects in my department this year.
We have recently doubled our department (to 2).
My personal design aesthetic is bright solid colors, and large san-serif
fonts in white, significant use of “negative space”
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Introduction
Types of projects Avalon design department works on:
• Direct mail components • Brochures/inserts • Digital ads, email marketing,
splash pages,
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“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design,
in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is
invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the
other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very
noticeable.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
What makes good Design
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What makes good Design/Design Basics
• Function over Form
• Simplicity
• Type/Visual Hierarchy
• White Space/Balancing Space
• Color Theory
• Font Choice
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Design Basics 1: Function/Simplicity
Function over Form
Simplicity.
Less is More (especially on Reply Forms)
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Design Basics 2: Type Hierarchy
Type Hierarchy
• No crowding.
• Everything can’t be bold/underlined/or all caps: When you try to make everything
stand out, nothing stands out.
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Design Basics 2: Type Hierarchy
Type Hierarchy
Determine the most important components of your message and establish 3-4
levels of type hierarchy.
• Primary,
• Secondary,
• Tertiary
Type heiracrchy can be
created using:
• Size
• Weight
• Color
• Typeface
• Lower/Uppercase
• Location
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Design Basics 3: Space
Space: Visual Hierarchy & White Space
• Visual hierarchy: see also; type hierarchy.
• Think about what is most important, and lead the eye
in the order that you want it seen.
• Same techniques: size, color, location, etc.
• People generally read left to right, top to bottom, so
use that to your advantage
White space is your friend: Balancing space
• White Space, aka Negative Space, aka Blank
Space
• Creates rest for eyes and mind
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Design Basics 4: Color
Color Theory
Color is a powerful tool to create interest, emphasize content, create a
mood, or establish hierarchy without additional images/graphics.
Guidelines:
• Black text on white is the most legible
• White text can be be great, with headers, and small amounts of text
• Generally avoid color on color (specifically 2 bright colors)
• Darker colors attract attention first, so use a mix of dark and light
colors for balance
• Think about how color changes context with Monotone photos.
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Design Basics 4: Color
• White text can be
be great, with
headers, and small
amounts of text
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Design Basics 4: Color
• Generally avoid color on color (specifically 2 bright colors)
This does not work well.
This does not work well.
This does work very well.
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Design Basics 4: Color
• Think about how color changes photos with Monotone photos.
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Design Basics 5: Type
Serif vs Sans-Serif –Why not
both?
Online/web design
Always sans-serif
Print design (body copy)
Usually serif
Visually interesting to combine Serif &
Sans-serif. Try a sans-serif headline,
and serif body copy for printed pieces
Read this headline
Now here is body copy in a
different typeface. This is a
visually interesting pairing
because this text is so
different.
Have a finite amount of fonts. 3-4 fonts for a webpage.
Print-depends, but usually 2-3 type-faces, plus bold-italics.
Think about the media that you are designing for.
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Staying on Brand
• Your brand is not as familiar as you think it is.
You don’t want to vary fonts/colors too much
• Your brand is not as stale as you think it is.
Don’t abandon brand colors/fonts:
Most people aren’t as tired of it as you are.
Design considerations-Brand
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Design Considerations-Production
• The Return Envelopes need (correct) barcodes, FIM
white mail codes, legal info
• Space around the window on an envelope.
• Printing full bleed on the edges or to the window will
take more time money.
• Think about the whole package, and how it will look.
• Everything has to mail
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Design Considerations
Help me help you: Some things you can do to help
make the design process easier and more efficient
• Don’t embed images in email or Word – there is often image
compression that messes with integrity of image.
• Think about the dimensions of the photos you choose for projects.
Is it Vertical or Horizontal? Does that seem problematic for the
particular project?
• Specificity is my best friend. Feel free to send examples.
• If there is something that needs to be done or not done, please let
us know.
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C0417NAQ October
Updated since original package
grid
C O M P O N E N T S
Package Mail Date Quan. OE Letter Reply BRE
FY17 October Year-
End Appeal
10/5/17 10,000
Size #10 Closed Face 8.5x11, 2s/4p 8.5x7 #9
Stock 24# white wove 60# white offset 60# white offset 24# white wove
Inks 3 PMS/1 PMS PMS 7474, PMS 3025/K PMS 7474, 3025 & K/K K
Postage non-profit n/a n/a
Design - Bleeds logo logo TBD n/a
Format - Perfs n/a No No n/a
Copy teaser TBD Yes Yes n/a
Personalized? Yes
simplex laser - page 1: 2 versions
general & sanctuary
simplex laser - front n/a
Production Notes n/a n/a
Component Codes n/a n/a yes W17D3C
Finishes/Folds n/a thirds half n/a
Flies Package Yes No No n/a
Our Processes/Tools
Package grid
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Thank You!
Blake Echols
Senior Graphic Designer
Avalon Consulting Group
202-627-6530
blakee@avalonconsulting.net
Follow Avalon on LinkedIn today!
Editor's Notes
I am Blake Echols, Senior Designer. I’ve been at Avalon since 2013,
I oversee all of the in-house design at Avalon. ** We have a lot of projects running simultaneously, and we use various outside designers, but currently we do the majority of our design work “in-house”.
We are on pace to for nearly 300 projects in my department this year. We have recently doubled our department (to 2).
My personal design aesthetic is bright solid colors, and large san-serif fonts in white, significant use of “negative space”
Have Samples
Have Samples
Function over form.
“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.” ― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
**If you’ve noticed an umpire in a baseball game, he’s not doing a good job.
Simplicity: **Something to pull the viewer in, maybe a photo or a big headline font, but then you want to move the eye easily and quickly through the info.
**You are competing with many distractions, and your printed pieces have to get your need across before the mail is set aside or discarded, or online with other emails, websites, and whatever task or entertainment the viewer is online for anyway.
Reply Forms: Less is more.
**You don’t need a log of stuff crammed in, or distractions. A clear pitch and call to action.
**And similarly, Letters can be helped by photos, but they need to be supplementary so they accentuate and support the copy but don’t “take you out” of the narrative.
**Talk through examples.
**Left was created for this, the right is an actual reply I was working on while making this slide show.
Type Hierarch
***A “type hierarchy” is a system for organizing type within your design project. It’s not sexy, but it’s one of the simplest and most effective ways to organize your designs
No crowding.
Everything can’t be bold/underlined/or all caps: When you try to make everything stand out, nothing stands out. ***Becomes a table of people simultaneously yelling. ***You want the eye to have a smooth trip, a clear flow. Not make the eye work harder and the person lose interest.
Type hierarchy Best practices: Determine the most important components of your message. Establish 3-4 levels of type hierarchy.
***** • 1. Primary Type: Primary type has the most visual weight. Its purpose is to bring readers into the design. Primary type commonly describes main headers or display quotations. ***** • 2. Secondary Type: Secondary type refers to any type that is not the main body content, but which is also not primary type; for example, subheadings, captions, and navigational elements like tables of contents.
***** • 3 Tertiary Type: Tertiary type is your main body copy. Readability matters most here. Type heiracrchy can be created using size, weight, color, typeface, lowercase/uppercase, location.
Visual hierarchy: see also; type hierarchy *****essentially the same as type hierarchy.
**** It’s the same principles as we just discussed, it’s just when the text also has logos, and images. Think about what is most important, and lead the eye in the order you want it seen. Same techniques as mentioned before. People read left to right, top to bottom, so use that advantage- ***don’t fight what the eye wants to do naturally
** Go back to the image 3 slides ago, walk through where the eyes go, why column is on the right.
White space is your friend: Balancing space ***Whitespace, often known as negative space, refers to the area of a design left blank. ***White space is not always white. It just denotes an empty space it can be a patch of color as well.
***It’s empty space inside, outside, and around the content that is calming and lets the viewer focus ***Focus is not naturally a strong trait in humans: When every element screams for attention, your eyes and mind wander and can’t rest on any one element at one time.
White on colors are your friend ok in **large brochure.
Generally avoid color on color (CC red-blue example).
Think of perspective on monotone photos (angry? Sick? Sad?
Darker colors attract attention first, so use a mix of dark and light colors for balance.
***Text is 18 & 14 pt and because of it’s larger size, it looks fine white on a color, and in fact may look too big if it was black text on white.
Serif vs San-Serif –Why not both.
Always sans-serif online/web design. ***This is because computer monitors have less resolution than paper. The variation of thickness on the lines are more difficult to portray legibly online.
Usually, serif for print body copy.
****I say usually. There is still a debate on sans vs serif body copy. have historically been credited with increasing both the readability and reading speed of long passages of text because they help the eye travel across a line, especially if lines are long The scientific consensus is incomplete regarding studies between the two. But san-serif is generally the standard, because viewers are more conditioned to seeing serif fonts in books, newspapers, and magazines. But with people spending more time online, reading san-serif text, it may start changing how printed text is read in the future..
Visually interesting to combine Serif & Sans-serif. Try a sans-serif headline, and serif body copy for printed pieces
Have a finite amount of fonts. 3-4 fonts for a webpage. Print-depends, but usually 2-3 type-faces, plus bold-italics.
Think about the media that you are designing for.
*** Examples bus ads, billboard.
Image resolution: Web vs. print (72 dpi vs. 300 dpi)
***Resolution is the density of dots of color. Online they are called pixels, print they are called dots. DPI or PPI. Computer screens are 72 dpi, paper prints 300 dpi. It’s why those photos you printed from facebook look so bad.
Vector vs. Raster Raster- .jpg, png. Vector- .eps, .ai
Raster- photos/web, Vector- logos/graphics ****I always want your logo as a vector file. I want to know it can be resized to any size at print resolution, and the colors are editable, so if we need a logo to be a different color or white/black, and you don’t already have a version made, I can make it.
***CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (the black plate was typically call the “key” plate.), RGB: red, green, blue colors on projects. A good rule of thumb is anything dealing with the web should always be in
Additive vs subtractive color The secondary colors make each other There are more individual colors available in RGB, so they don’t always translate exactly. Websites and digital cameras are in RGB, so you have to be sure to convert the photos more they go to print.
**** Every company I’ve ever been a part of or interacted with wanted to change their brand.
You see it daily. People aren’t as bored with your branding as you are.
***The Return Envelopes need (correct) barcodes, FIM white mail codes, legal info (Facing Identification Mark- one of 5 different series of vertical bars)
Space around the window on an envelope.
Printing full bleed on the edges or to the window will take more time money.
Think about the whole package, and how it will look. (oversized envelope and losing letter)
*****There is a 55 page document you can get from the USPS website about designing for the mail, but the main thing to remember is
• Everything has to mail
Help me help you: Some things you can do to help make the design process easier and more efficient
Don’t embed images in email or Word – there is often image compression that messes with integrity of image. *****Please send any files as an attachment in an Email
Think about the dimensions of the photos you choose for projects. Is it Vertical or Horizontal? Does that seem problematic for the particular project? ***Give example of vertical photo of a person in front of a tall structure for email. Couldn't be cropped. Square in a bookmark
Specificity is my best friend. Feel free to send examples.
If there is something that needs to be done or not done, please let us know. **** There are specific things about your company that only you know. Story of dancers’ foot
