Creative Tips #10: How Do You Look?

We've covered a lot of ground in these newsletters; lots of details that make a big difference to how your letters, proposals, and other communications represent you to the world. In the next week or two we're going to step back, take a broader look, and cover some big-corporation techniques that can work wonders for your image, whether you're a sole proprietor, mom and pop operation or a medium sized business making $20 million a year.

Looks Matter

So you've got a killer name for your company, a spiffy logo, and tons of beautiful literature guaranteed to knock the socks off your potential customers and make your competitors sick with envy. Got it made, right? Right? Wrong. Not by a long way.

These things are important. Of course they are. But many businesses put a lot of effort into creating a great first impression, only to blow it by sloppy communications to prospects and customers.

The documents you send out, whether printed or email, say a lot about you. They can say "big," "successful," "professional." They can also say "sloppy," "small time," "struggling." Part of this is what you say, but a great deal is the look of what you say.

Here's an exercise. Think of it as a homework assignment: this week, instead of chucking out all those unsolicited pieces you get in the mail, open them, keeping just the letters. (Brochures and flyers are another topic. Right now we're only looking at letters, credit card or non-profit solicitations and the like.) Don't read them. We're dealing with appearance, not substance. Just look them over and divide them into three piles, based on your impression of the company that sent each piece: 1) big and prosperous, 2) smaller but professional, and 3) cheapskate or struggling.

I guarantee you'll start to see a pattern. There are some letters that just instantly turn you off, aren't there? Before you've even read the first line. They're in pile three. In pile one you have the letters that created the best first impression. In between there are letters that look like they come from smaller but reputable companies.

Take a few minutes or a half hour to analyze what the differences are that create those impressions. When it comes to business communication, this is the starting line, Square Zero, the place the rubber meets the road.

Keep them, because next time, with that all fresh in your mind, we're going to take up some design strategies that may shock you, especially coming from a graphic designer.

Medium vs. Message

Way back in the 1950s Marshall McLuhan (a professor and a famous writer on marketing matters) famously said: "The medium IS the message." Although he was exaggerating the case a bit, he was making a very important point. The typography, the paper, the layout, the colors, everything about how a communication looks has a heavy influence on how its message is received, or even if it's received at all. (Think of all the stuff that normally goes into your trash, unopened and unread.)

Before you can impress someone with your words, you have to get them to read what you have to say. These factors, like the many tips we've looked at in the last few weeks, give you an opportunity to be read. You can think of them as the smooth carrier wave on which the communication travels when they are in harmony, or the noise that drowns it out when they aren't. And that segues neatly into the next topic, consistency, which we'll take up next time.

I was a writer before I was a designer, and I had a great and naive faith the power of the written word. It took being bonked on the head a few times as I was studying graphic design and marketing before it finally sunk in: the written word has power only when it becomes the read word and it looks believable. It looks believable if the design, the typeface, the paper, the logo and all the other parts look like they belong together, and belong with that communication.

Bonus Tip

When you're working with a word processor, your hands are on the keyboard, right? So why do you spend so much time moving your hand to the mouse, moving the mouse, and clicking on stuff just to do simple things? Here are some things you can do right from the keyboard:

Happy typesetting,

Alan Gilbertson
Creative Director
G&G Creative

The Creative Tips newsletter is published by G&G Creative, Tujunga, CA. More at www.gngcreative.com or on the blog.

G&G Creative specializes in graphic design, photography and copy writing for print and the web.

Copyright © 2009 Alan Gilbertson. All Rights Reserved.