Susan Wilson Solovic: Business cards and brochures can be a great business booster for a small firm and our guest today says you can have a professional look without the cause of a professional designer. Andrew Field founded PrintingForLess.com and quickly made it one of the nation’s fastest growing companies. His leadership has been recognized with numerous business awards including the Winning Workplaces Best Boss Award and a Stevie Award along with recognition as one of the best of the web.
Welcome Andrew. Welcome toSBTV.com.
Andrew Field: Thanks for having me.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Let’s start of and talk about business brochures because everybody likes to have a brochure that they can leave behind. What are some of the best practices when you’re considering designing a brochure?
Andrew Field: Well, among the things that you can do is if you want something that’s highly customized and really matches the look and feel of the brochure to your business into your message is the higher professional graphic designer. They’re well worth the money. If you can’t afford to do that, you can go to something like StockLayouts.com and we have links of our website to them where you have professionally designed brochures that you can substitute your own pictures in and out. They also have some stock photography already there which has some very nice high quality photography.
A third option is to use the templates that come free in a product like Microsoft Word or a publisher where once again you can put your own copy and then you can substitute in your own pictures for your brochure.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Speaking of pictures, you mention stock photography. Is that expensive or can you just go out in the web and just pull anything and use it in your brochure?
Andrew Field: You can’t just pull anything and use it in your brochure. Most images on the web are at 72, that’s per inch which is how we measure resolution and that looks fine on the web. It looks terrible when printed. So we recommend people use high resolution photography or by stock images and they’re really not very expensive. They’re sometimes as low as $50.00 for a whole disk film and sometimes as high as $200.00 or $300.00 for one very high quality image.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And once you buy that stock photography, can you use it more than once in more than one location like if I’m going to do a brochure and maybe a postcard mailer?
Andrew Field: It depends on the licensing associated with that but often people do use the same images over and over again. The very important thing to remember though on brochures is particularly on that front panel is to try to use one or two larger images rather than a whole lot of little ones. Studies have shown that one big images means realism and sort of a professional look compared to a lot of little images.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Let’s go back to learn about some basics because everybody who’s in business needs a business card. Will you agree with that?
Andrew Field: I would.
Susan Wilson Solovic: What are the simple things that you need to make sure on your business card?
Andrew Field: Believe or not, we’ve printed people’ business cards when they forgot to send their email address or their website address or their phone number and you never know whether they are virtual business or exactly how they’re doing that and the most important thing is to remember, don’t try to jam to match too much on. Business card is not lot a real estate. It’s 3-1/2 inches by 2 inches an if you try to put too much on, you’ll end up going to a little tiny font that most of us can’t read anymore.
So you want to stick with the basics. If you do have a little extra that you want to add like a tagline or a little elevator pitch for your business, flip it over and use the back. It doesn’t cost much more to print on the back of your business card.
Susan Wilson Solovic: What do you think about using photos on a business card because I see a lot of people when I’m out of the bench they hand me their business card and their photo is right there.
Andrew Field: I think depending on the business. It’s very good or its not, mortgage lenders and realtors are very heavy users of their image because it’s very much of a relationship business. Others tend to be a little more conservative like bankers and lawyers and that sort of thing. I think the most important thing is to use lots of color and whether that’s great background or some sort of boarder or something like that. I think some good use of color will help your business card stand out from the others when people have to follow after them after a long business trip.
Susan Wilson Solovic: What about paper, there is such a variety of papers that you can choose from today? Is the there a best practices when it comes o selecting the paper?
Andrew Field: Absolutely! Our joke is if it doesn’t feel like a shingle, go with the heavier paper. I think the feel is very important part of handing a out a business card otherwise, it would all just be electronic and a nice thick heavy stock whether glossy encoded or uncoded is a very important part of a good business card.
Susan Wilson Solovic: I know that you’ve been in this business and you’ve been very successful for a long time. If people really need assistance in designing this work and their business card or their brochure, are there some—and you mentioned a couple but there are other resources they can go to?
Andrew Field: One of the things they could do is call us and we would actually put you in touch if you’d like with some designers in your area who are customers of ours since one of the services we provide is you give us your zip code and we’ll look for designers and graphic artist in your area if you want someone that you can work with one on one.
Another thing people can do is go to CreativePro.com which has lots of advice on how to do good design work, how to build good brochures, how to use digital photography and that sort of thing.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And when you’re working with someone like that, can you ask for like a flat C or is it by the hour or can you negotiate that?
Andrew Field: Everything is negotiable when it comes to design work.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Okay, very good. Well, thank you very much for being here. I appreciate all your good advice and inside tips.
Andrew Field: Thank you Susan.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And of course, we’re talking to Andrew Field, the President and CEO of PrintingForLess.com. We appreciating him being here and of course there are other segments with practical tips and advice from Andrew right here on SBTV.com and you can learn more about his company by going to PrintingForLess.com.
I’m Susan Wilson Solovic and you’re watching SBTV.com where small is our only business.
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