The dotted line is a powerful thing. It is one of those secret weapons that marketers use to draw attention to a specific part of the communication. It is most commonly used to highlight an offer or a call-to-action.

What was once used as a directional vehicle, dotted lines were put in to signal to the customer that it was a coupon to cut out. In fact, in some cases where marketers  had zero confidence in customer intelligence, they would even throw in a little icon of a scissor.

Where production budgets allow, we also add a perforation around the coupon to make it even easier to tear out. In these cases, we still print the dotted line to call attention to the coupon. Read more…

You may notice a trend these days in magazine ads and musician photos. It’s a gritty grungy look that can easily be achieved with a normal photo with a little bit of photoshop work.

Here is a great tutorial on how to make this cool Gritty HDR image effect.

With the ever-changing postal rates and regulations, it is important to notice the details in how you can streamline efficiencies. Here is the author of the blog “Hacking Netflix” in a very interesting video comparing the envelopes of Netflix and Blockbuster.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcPTjBdRStQ[/youtube]

There is order in nature and order in everything we do and it is called math. In order to prevent totally revealing how nerdy I really am, I must say that math has always influenced my art.

Whether it is the Golden Section, Fibonacci’s Sequence, or this Moebius Transformation (below), math can create order in grids, color sequences, type hierarchy, and brand structure. As a creative, where do you find inspiration and order?

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=JX3VmDgiFnY[/youtube]

Acquiring customers are tricky. Acquiring them around the holidays is even trickier. The reality is you may have a strong marketing message or a phenomenal offer but if you can’t get it read or seen you are in big trouble. And the holidays are one of the most challenging times to breakthrough to a potential customer.

The Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukah seasons are filled with vacations, parties, and unfocused people. How do you prepare for the endless “out of the office” email bounce backs and piles of unread mail on your prospect’s desks? And couple that with the added complexity of trying to spend your marketing budget before the end of the year and you can get conflicted. With some careful planning you can navigate this tricky time on the sales calendar. Read more…