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Design Police
The printing industry is plagued with examples of bad design. It's just a sad reality of print. Usually created by folks with little or no design experience, there's a whole lot of creative out there that serves injustice to print.
This equally applies to variable-data printing. While there are many software products that enable you to create personalised printed documents, there are some people who should to be banned from using them. I'm talking about those who see an impressive mail piece created by some specific VDP software and think "oh, I can design that with this software!" No, they can't. There's just some stuff that needs to be left to real designers.
I've seen countless examples of creative that just misses the mark and was obviously created by someone who doesn't really know what they're doing—from personalisation applied with different fonts and colours within a single mailer, to just plain bad design. Personalised images are a classic example; just because you can fix stuff in Photoshop, doesn't qualify you to add personalisation to images. There are plenty examples of poor personalised images designed by users who should be kept well away from such software tools. They're doing injustice to print, impacting DM response rates, and devaluing variable-data publishing along the way.
Fortunately, the Design Police has come to our rescue, with a mission of "bringing bad design to justice". They've put together a five page 'visual enforcement kit' which you can print out on adhesive paper, and stick to any offending design. The stickers feature useful warnings, including "reduce number of typefaces", "Helvetica was an unimaginative choice" and "unnecessary use of Photoshop effect".
Get sticking!
Posted on Monday, 31 March 2008 at 9:18 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/112
Comments
LOL - you don't know how many times I have wanted to say some of these things... I would need about 20 'Awful library stock photo' stickers in the first week. A place I used to work at had an inhouse design group that would even sometimes get off topic and simply throw stuff in because they thought it was cool... so even professionals need a reminder or two. I on the other hand could NEVER design a thing (I've tried, it wasn't pretty), I can only spot bad designs, like everyone else :-)
Posted by Rob on Monday, 31 March 2008 at 11:41 PM