As most of you know, Salt Lake Design Week is fast approaching!
This year, the myriad of events will take place between October 22nd and October 27th. From PechaKucha Night and Student Exhibits to Informative Workshops on Wall Graphics and Letterpress, Local Studio Tours and the infamous Pixels of Fury. Don’t miss the amazing events this year’s Design Week has in store. Go show your face, make new friends and learn the latest tips and tricks!
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
Using scientific proof and state-of-the-art multimedia techniques, Aaron James Draplin of the Draplin Design Co. delivers a suckerpunch of a talk that aims to provide bonafide proof of work, the highs and lows of a ferociously independent existence and a couple tall tales from his so-called career in the cutthroat world of contemporary graphic design. Just a regular American guy with a trajectory a little dirtier than yours, his talk is open to all oncomers brave enough to show up. If you are a youngster, you may find yourself inspired to attack your design future in a different way. If you are established, you may just leave feeling grateful you don’t have anything to do with him. Hard to say. All Salt Lake City champion citizens are invited to attend. Be there!
Newspaper ads, despite being the oldest form of print advertising, are still an effective way to reach a large audience. However, you need to make sure it is the right audience! Unlike the Internet which has a young demographic, the majority of newspaper readers are usually those aged 45+. Even so, you can get the best results out of your ads by requesting that they run in the sections of the newspaper which most closely relate to your target audience.
Since newspapers are divided into columns, your ads will be sized according to a predetermined formula: a certain number of columns wide and a certain number of inches long. By doing a little bit of research, you can find out the typical ad sizes for your local newspapers based on column width. It is best that you design your ad to fit correctly within the provided parameters in order to avoid any resizing issues during post-production.
Here are some tips you can keep in mind while designing your newspaper ad:
Use the bottom section of your ad as a coupon to provide an added incentive for readers to visit your location. Use the coupon to track the response rate of your ads–you’ll know how good your ads are by the number of people using the coupon.
Add a URL to your print ad to drive people to your website. There, you can tell and sell them more and provide a printable coupon.
Give your sales rep all the information they might need well ahead of deadline so you can get a proof sheet to check all the facts before it goes to print.
When it comes to proofing, check your phone number, your URL, any percentages off, brand names, and every other detail. Get another pair of eyes to check for mistakes, too.
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