John Lewis have plunged £7 million into one advert, children are eagerly anticipating the day when a hungry fat man will break into their house and homes suddenly have more lights outside than in. It can only mean that Christmas is once again clearly upon us. Even those who try to emulate the ethos of Ebenezer Scrooge, cannot ignore the fact that Christmas is big business. From a marketing perspective, it affords companies the opportunity to give clients a cheery reminder of who they are and what they do. It is unlikely that many brands will be able to allocate the kind of budget John Lewis can, however there are other ways to utilise Christmas to enhance your marketing strategy.

2012 recorded a £148m spend on single Christmas cards. A card is great low-cost way to raise brand awareness. Using a digital print company to produce personalised Christmas cards, ensures the message sent out conveys exactly what you intend it to. Think of it as a mail-out which will definitely be taken notice of. Office workers are sure to display cards on their desk throughout the whole of the Christmas season. It is probable however, you will be competing against other businesses for attention. So how do you stand out from the crowd?

Employing a digital print campaign to create a personalised card gives you complete control over your message. To get even more longevity out of the campaign, consider including promotional items in the mail-out too. In a recent survey by the British Promotional Merchandise Agency (BMPA), 87% of people said they would keep a promotional item for longer than a year with 79% agreeing they were likely to work with that brand again soon.

Here are three strategies to try:

Create a theme

The Coca-Cola delivery truck is now synonymous with their annual Christmas campaign, you can even pick up miniature versions of it online. Think about what item suits your brand, then theme the mail-out around it. You could promote a product, service or even show off your brand values. For example, companies who pride themselves on being environmentally friendly, could choose recycled card and an eco-friendly promotional item.

Create a holiday hashtag

Use your Christmas campaign to increase interaction with your brand online. Print your social media handles to the card and gift, encouraging people to join your conversation. Using a hashtag is another way to create a buzz and track engagement. The John Lewis hashtag #BearAndHare was trending almost immediately after the release of the advert. Think about what defines your campaign and what conversation it is likely to generate. If you did not choose one, what do you think people would create for themselves? Use these answers to make your choice, remembering to keep it short and snappy!

Create a Christmas countdown

Think about the different ways you could design the card itself. A card which transforms into an advent calendar is a clever way to get your recipient engaging every day in December. The print area behind each door allows ample scope for inventive marketing. Special offers, funny quotes or interesting sayings will keep people talking. You could even utilise promotional items as winning gifts. If participants open the door to a spot prize, they will need to email or even tweet a unique code to redeem it.

Silver Birch Creative is a graphic design and branding company based in our home town of Derby.  They specialise in brand development and design and combine small agency values with big agency capability. Their portfolio is brimming with exquisite examples of quality, on brand design and well worth a browse.  We really enjoy working with a client who consistently produces such excellent work and also challenges us with print jobs which demand specialisation.

We recently worked on a project with Silver Birch Creative for FTSE500.com.  FTSE500.com provide businesses and corporations with a globally leading Executive Search partner.  Silver Birch were tasked with the challenge of designing a brochure and accompanying business cards that reflected this high end market and delivered an aesthetic that was corporate enough to appeal to a target market of blue chip companies, whilst still being contemporary and inviting.

To complement the design, Silver Birch needed the brochure to be printed to the highest quality on the best material.  Specialist print finishes were used to achieve the quality required.  The outer of the brochure was finished with a Soft Touch laminate to the outer with a Spot UV logo.
The business cards were also printed using a special process.  The cards were Duplexed to a give a thickness of 600gsm with soft touch laminate and Spot UV finish to complement the corporate brochure.
We’ve worked with Silver Birch Creative on a number of projects and hope to work with them again in the future.  When asked about Purely Digital, Managing Director Karl Shaw commented,

“Purely always deliver on quality and service, advice is always at hand and it’s always instant not a day later.  Andy is a fountain of knowledge!”

To find out more about Silver Birch Creative visit their website or give them a call on 01332 290 557

It takes the same amount of energy to make a handful of microchips as it does a car and we generate between 20-50 million of tonnes of e-waste globally each year without recycling any of it.

We’re asked to think of the environment before we print out emails, but is digital communication and paperless interaction actually as good for the environment as we think? Take a look at our infographic assessing the environmental impact of print versus digital and find out for yourself.

If you’re a graphic designer, illustrator or just like to draw, chances are you have a sketchpad, and chances are this sketchpad is full of detailed drawings, abstract scribbles and, of course, a fair few doodles. But did you know these doodles could reveal some exposing secrets hidden in your subconscious? According to the vice-chair of the British Institute of Graphologists Ruth Rostron our doodles can be like “Freudian slips or body-language that we’re not aware of” because we tend to only be half-conscious of what we draw, when we draw them. So time to learn a little more about ourselves…

Although the content of what we draw can reveal some insights into our inner psyche it’s actually how we draw a doodle which gives the most insight.

Straight or curly?

Straight lines represent strong willpower and self-control; curved strokes demonstrate flexibility, imagination and emotion.

Circle, square or triangle?

People who want harmony and love tend to draw rounded shapes and circles. Circles can also be symbols of friendship and femininity. Down-to-earth, practical types who enjoy being in control are more likely to draw square shapes. They tend to be grounded and realistic people who have an organised, scientific approach and a sense of security.

Triangles a little more interesting; if you draw triangles or pointed shapes regularly then you might have a lot of energy that needs to be released. These kinds of people are creative, active and ambitious and tend to be determined. They can also be dreamers who have a difficult time staying grounded in reality.

Where on the page?

Where you draw your doodle indicates something about your attitude to aspects of your life. Doodling at the top of the page indicates a preoccupation with aspirations and dreams, the bottom of the page represents security and material concerns, the right is the future and the left is the past and family.

Style and stroke

If you doodle with a heavy stroke then you’re a determined person, but if you go over and over a line then you might be frustrated, obsessed or stuck with a problem. Heavy shading or criss-cross strokes suggest depression or worry. If you use a light touch then you’re probably a sensitive person and might be a little hesitant in day to day life.

Drawing lines or objects in rows shows a methodical approach, good organisation and an appreciation of order and control. Disorderly looking doodles indicate a lively personality and an individual who does thing spur of the moment and has a tendency to get side-tracked.

Some common doodles explained:

Stars: Stars indicate ambition. Lots of little starts indicate optimism, a big embellished star indicates a clear goal in sight and neat uniform starts suggest good mental focus. Free hand means you’ve got a lot energy.

Squares or boxes: Indicate you want control and that you are thinking through a problem. If a box becomes a cube you’re probably a very efficient, analytical person who can deal with difficult situations without fuss.

Flowers: Flowers indicate an amiable, family-centric person who is sociable. A dropping flower head indicates worry.

Please consider the environment before not printing this page.  That request asking you to kindly not print your last email might have the best of intentions for our environment, but it fails to take into account a major factor which influences the “sustainability” of your decision; the internet.  Advice related to paper and the environment will often recommend doing as much online as possible, but keeping it digital whenever you can might not be as eco-friendly as you think.  Like everything you do, working in the digital world has a carbon legacy and most shockingly the environmental impact of the internet relates directly to deforestation; just the thing you’re saving when you opt-out of the paper world.

Moving our lives online perpetuates our desire to be online. Everyone has recognised this from marketers, app developers and manufacturers who capitalise on and conflate our desire to ascend into the virtual reality. When our laptops stop working or we replace our old tablet with the latest version we create e-waste.  In the US in 2010 out of 384 million electronic units only 19% were recycled, the rest ended up in landfill letting toxic substances like mercury, lead and cadmium infect water, land and air.  But it’s not just the old equipment we need to think about, the energy used to manufacture more and more gadgets, known as grey energy, has its impact too.

These are all things to consider before you buy lots of technological equipment, but once you’ve bought you’re new ipad there’s not that much you can do, and if you’re at work it probably wouldn’t go down too well to take all computers you deem superfluous to the recycling.  The carbon footprint of the internet doesn’t stop at building the initial computer, the amount of time online and what you do online massively contribute.

When you’re browsing the internet or writing up that work report your computer is powering a hidden mass of data which uses up a lot of energy. Dark data is all the stuff which floats around on the internet and computers unaccounted for.  They’re the bits of data that get left behind; user PST files on desktops, the data on your USB stick, old versions of websites now defunct, downloads that get tucked away and forgotten about.  Dark data is like the shadow or light data (which is data in use) and it’s estimate that we consume on average 34 gigabytes a day of data, most of it being this kind of dark data.  So it’s not just having a device on which uses energy, it’s the exact tasks you engage in which drain it.

And it’s all driving deforestation

According to the ISC the growth of digital media and therefore higher demand for energy directly contribute to deforestation, whereas the paper industry doesn’t.  In a report looking into the environmental impact of “going paperless” it’s reported that,

“Internet servers and data centres are contributing to the destruction of more than 500 mountains and over 600 square miles of forest.”

So next time you notice that plea to ‘not print this email’ think about the environmental impact of staying online.

It’s not exactly breaking news that print has to adapt to a new digital world.  Changes aren’t just happening in the amount or type of print in demand, but also in the technology being developed to produce print.  In order to survive, printers are being required to innovate and one area where print can really stand out is in print finishing. There’s a whole host of techniques which can really set off your printed item but many underestimate the value of a decent or unique finishing technique.

Why

Print finishing takes an ordinary printed item and adds tremendous value.  Our move into the digital world means that a tactile, physical experience is really valued and print finishing enhances the physicality of your printed item either by creating a unique visual or texture.  Things like foiling and embossing will give your print a metallic look that you just can’t get from a screen, and UV varnishing allows you to create a variety of textures.  Printed materials can become as engaging and interactive as your computer screen with the right finish.  Thermochromic finishes use inks that are sensitive to heat so that when you touch them they reveal something beneath.

The inks are available in different temperatures so could be designed to react to chilling, moisture or more intense heating.  This allows for some really creative possibilities for a cookery book or menu, for example.  Digital publications are striving to make their applications as interactive as possible with personalised online recipe books and the like, but maybe a page which demonstrates the cooking process through touch has more of a wow factor?  Photochromic ink works in a similar way but reacts to UV or sunlight.  A campaign about solar power or lighting could employ this kind of technique creatively.

Lots of printers agree that print finishing is where some real innovations can be made.  Speaking to printweek, Celloglas explained that they see the future of print heavily involving innovations in print finish. After all, the one thing print has over digital information is its physicality, and print finish is designed to enhance this physicality and the tactile experience of a printed item.

Talk to the right person and you’ll discover that fonts are a big deal in the world of design.   Typographers can spend weeks designing a new font and designers can spend forever gushing about the elegance of an old classic.  A lot of fonts actually have a really long history which dates back much further than the dawn of Microsoft word.  So read on to find out a few things you never knew about fonts you might use every day.

Times New Roman:

Probably the most well-known font of all time, times new roman was first designed in 1931 by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent.  The designers were commissioned by The Times newspaper to improve the readability of print following complaints from readers.

Helvetica:

Helvetica is used by countless brands in logos including British Gas, Oral B, Evian and Post-it.  It was originally designed in 1957 by Max Meidinger and Eduard Hoffman and has become one of the most popular type-faces in the world.  Managing director of Linotype (who own the font) Frank Wildenberg speaking about the font said,

“It’s durable.  It comes from natural design forms.  It doesn’t have an expression of fashion.  It has very clear lines and characters”

This might explain why it’s lasted so long and is used in countless contexts from airport signs to big name brand logos.  The font is so popular it’s inspired a whole film.  Will Helvetica’s dominance ever wane?

Clarendon:

Clarendon is a very old font which you might not recognise by name but you’re bound to recognise by sight.  It was originally created in England by Robert Besley in the 1840s, and was commonly used on wanted posters in the Wild West.  Today it’s often used for decorative door numbers and building name plaques.  Sony use it in their logo.

Gill Sans:

BBC news and the London Underground both use this clean, clear font which was designed by Eric Gill around 1926-1928.  It was adopted heavily by the London and North Eastern Railway system for use on station signs, timetables and in publicity and advertising.

Comic Sans:

Comic sans is one of the most controversial fonts ever designed with a lot of font fanatics repeatedly describing comic sans as the worst typeface ever.  There’s even a website dedicated to ridding the world of this font. The playful font was first made by Microsoft word in 1995 and mimics the style of comic book scripts.  It’s generally considered to be a font reserved for informal purposes and not suitable for use in professional environments, but comic sans does have its defenders.

If you want to know some more facts about famous fonts then take a look here to expand your knowledge!

Hurricane Sandy forged a path of destruction through the Caribbean and up into the United States hitting New York on October 29, 2012 with devastating consequences.  The hurricane left hundreds of thousands of homes without power and up to 133 people died in total across the Caribbean and east coast of the US.   As well as families being severely affected by the extreme weather, businesses operating in New York were subject to lengthy downtimes because they simply weren’t prepared for this kind of emergency situation.  So what would a business need to think about if they were planning for a major disruption like hurricane Sandy?  If power is going to go down across a major city then what resources can be relied on?  Could we argue that printing hard copies of information normally stored digitally could offer a solution?

What are the options?

Every business should have a Business Continuity Management process planned out, and in places which are subject to extreme weather conditions, this should include how the business will cope if power goes down.  The plan should come up with potential routes for getting back to business as usual with minimum downtime and disruption incurred.  In the case of wide-scale power outage this means either finding alternative methods of supplying power so office infrastructure can be restored or finding different ways to operate when power goes down.

One office managed to completely avoid down time by using a cloud phone system.  Fieldpoint Private experienced zero downtime during the aftermath of Sandy because the business has subscribed to a hosted phone service managed by a California-based communication services provider, off-site and far away from New York.  Backed by a resilient data centre with multiple layers of backup power supply, Fieldpoint’s telephone service was not disrupted despite the company being based in New York.

It’s a smart idea, but the only issue with such a plan is the possibility of widespread downtime occurring.  We assume that, since the internet has never gone down it is completely infallible, but it’s not as impossible as you might think.

Rethinking data: backing up the internet

Cyber terrorism isn’t just a sci-fi fantasy, and though the possibility of the internet “going down” isn’t likely, the possibility of it being severely disrupted by various influences isn’t so far-fetched.  Wars of the future are likely to at least feature hacking of essential infrastructure if not be dominated by this method of waging war.  There’s already evidence of major hacking practices against the US where hackers managed to subvert the company’s server in order to play games.  Crucially they used up 95% of server power resources creating a “denial of service” attack on legitimate users.  A computer virus known as stuxnet managed to hack into Iranian energy infrastructure, and hackers have gained access to electric utility IT systems in the US.  If hackers can get access to essential systems like power supplies they can genuinely wreak havoc, something recognised by the US defence secretary who has warned that the “potential for another Pearl Harbour” lies in cyber-terrorists capability to carry out a cyber-attack that would “paralyze the country”.

So if infrastructure can be compromised to this extent it’s certainly possible that the internet could be disrupted, CNN give four examples of how the internet could go down.  And if the internet goes down, then cloud systems aren’t enough.  Is it viable then to consider some sort of bank of printed data to back up our digital information?  Similar to the theory behind holding gold in the Bank of England to stabilise a currency, could printed, physical documents become the safeguard of the digital information?  Digital printing machines can now print vast amounts in short spaces of time for a reasonable cost.  Is it time for businesses to print off “core” or essential information every so often and store it safely in a physical environment, so that if anything were to happen to our digital world, we’d have something to cling onto?

The recent US presidential election saw fierce fighting from both Republican and Democrat camps and an essential part of both parties’ campaigns was drumming up support through print.  Although both had a big drive via digital channels like Facebook and Twitter, up to $6 billion was spent by both parties on local, state and national elections across the country this year injecting the US print industry with significant business.

What print did

You might think that print campaigning is somewhat of a dying art but direct mailing, flyering, wide-format signage and speciality printing like bumper stickers played a major role in the election. Rochester Institute of Technology Professor Emeritus Frank Romano told PrintWeek that he’s noticed an increase in the amount of direct mail print being sent out by political parties as well as increase in customised mail as marketers try and make printed material more personal.  Many of the direct mail pieces sent out used digital printing services to directly address the receiver by name for example.  Romano also said a significant number of promotional postcards were sent out.

Innovations in print have increased the possibilities of what can be produced.  Far more people were using law signs to announce their affiliations and that’s in part because lawn signs can now have a picture of the candidate on them because of innovations in wide format inkjet.

Print in future campaigns

Commentators also saw clever uses of technology to enhance print.  QR codes started to be used in political direct mail and Jerry Cerasale, senior VP at the Direct Marketing Association predicts that QR codes will be used increasingly in 2014 and 2016.

This year data compliers and analyst companies helped campaigns to compile more precise, useful mailing lists via which they could contact potential voters which may well have benefitted the direct marketing industry.  The main question surrounding the marketing of campaigns in the future is how big a role social media and digital communication will play.  Commenting on this trend Cerasale told PrintWeek,

“There have been stories on the millions of “likes” that Romney and Obama had on social media, but what still hasn’t been determined is whether those translate into votes.  SO the efficacy of putting money into social media is something that’s going to be studied hard and analysed in the coming months to see, come the next election, where you’re going to be putting your money.”