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Matching Business Cards with
other marketing materials
It's
very important to make sure that all of your marketing materials match.
This ensures that when people see your business cards and then your
website, they know they're dealing with
the same company. Matching your business cards to your website, brochures,
postcard mailings, signs, stationery, etc., also creates 'brand recognition'.
This is accomplished by the use of a logo
and color scheme that remains constant on all of your marketing efforts.
Once your marketing materials have been seen a few times, your company
becomes instantly recognizable by your logo & color scheme.
So, right off the bat, select a color scheme and stick with it. If
you don't currently have a logo, get one. A professional designer
should be able to design a logo to your liking that is effective at
representing your company. Professional
logo design should include several versions of your logo that will
work across multiple platforms. When we create a logo for a customer,
we provide a CD that includes several formats and sizes of the logo
for business cards, stationery, websites and just about any other projects. For more information about logo design,
see our LOGO DESIGN SECTION.
We also offer website design services along
with printing and design of postcards, flyers, brochures, rack cards,
stationery and more. Business cards are just
the tip of the marketing iceberg. We're almost one stop shopping for
marketing materials.
Designing A Marketing Campaign
Before you create anything in business, it helps greatly to have an
idea of where you're going and what your future needs may be. A very
common problem arises when you go with the first thing you can throw
together and further down the road when it's time to update and expand
your project, you find it's not going to work.
This is especially true of marketing campaigns.
Many small businesses seem to start with a website.
There's no inherent problem with putting the website first in your
marketing campaign, but if the website designer creates your logo
and graphics; they're usually not suitable for print media.
Website and print media are not readily compatible. Very few people
out there understand this, even most graphic designers.
There are two fundamental differences between web and print media; Resolution and Color Mode. Resolution is simply the overall size and quality of an image.
Website graphics get by with a very low resolution of 72 DPI. DPI
stands for 'Dots Per Inch' and refers to the number of pixels in a
square inch, or how detailed an image is. This low DPI helps websites
load faster and it looks just fine on a website.
Print Media, like business cards, requires a much higher DPI. We recommend
a minimum DPI of 300 for full color business cards and postcards.
The DPI for a photo can be set in your scanner
program when you originally scan the image. If a photo was scanned
for a website, it will need to be scanned again for use on business
cards. If your using a digital camera, always keep the original raw
photo that you download from the camera. These will be cropped and
greatly reduced in size to fir into a website, but for business cards
and other printing jobs, having the original image can be very helpful.
Logos and other graphics need to be designed with print media in mind.
If you logo was designed only for use on
a website, it may only be about ¾" high at 72 DPI. This
is too small to even show up on business cards. If this is the case
with your logo, it may have to be re-created from scratch to work
with business cards or other printed marketing materials. Color Mode seems to cause the most frequent problems with printing
logos and other graphics. It's also the least understood parameter
of graphic design. Unfortunately, it's critical to getting your logos
and graphics to print properly. The two most common color modes for
computer graphics are 'RGB' and 'CMYK'. I won't go into all of the
particulars of technical stuff here, I'll just cover what you need
to know to get your marketing materials to match.
In a nutshell, RGB is for web graphics and CMYK is for printing. Here's
the tricky part:
CMYK can convert accurately to RGB, but RGB cannot convert accurately
to CMYK!
The
most common problem we encounter is that a customer sends us their
logo and graphic images that were created by a graphic designer for
their website and it was all created in RGB color mode at a very low
DPI. Then we have to charge the customer to re-create all this from
scratch. The customer finds this very frustrating because they may
have paid the designer for the logo separately, and now they find
out that it's useless!
There's a very simple way to avoid this. Make sure everything is designed,
from scratch, with print media in mind. If you're a graphic designer,
create everything in CMYK color mode at a very high resolution or,
if possible, vector graphics. If you're paying someone to design your
marketing materials, make sure they know what your future plans are.
Tell them you'll need the logo and some of the graphics for printed
marketing materials like business cards, postcards, brochures, etc
as well as a website. If they don't know the difference between RGB
and CMYK or if they don't what vector graphics are, find a new design
company immediately. There are a lot of guys out there who can make
some pretty pictures and call themselves graphics designers but they
don't actually know what they're doing.
Our services cover most of the bases of a marketing campaign; website
design, business cards, postcards, flyers,
brochures, stationery, and other printing products as well as layout
and design for your print ads.
Contact us to discuss your marketing campaign: Customer Service
It's
very important to make sure that all of your marketing materials match.
This ensures that when people see your business cards and then your
The
most common problem we encounter is that a customer sends us their
logo and graphic images that were created by a graphic designer for
their website and it was all created in RGB color mode at a very low
DPI. Then we have to charge the customer to re-create all this from
scratch. The customer finds this very frustrating because they may
have paid the designer for the logo separately, and now they find
out that it's useless!