The postcards are going to 5 x 7 with a .25" margin and a .125" bleed. I'm going to produce the cards in CMYK1.
I'll be marketing on behalf of the Writing Center @ PSU. The two demographics the cards will get sent to are incoming freshman and alumni of the English program at Pitt State. The call to action for the incoming freshman will be to inform them of the Writing Center and get them to schedule an appointment. The call to action for the donors will be to make a donation through mail, phone, or online.
These are the thumbs I worked on for the project:
I decided on pursuing the third option and made up a rough sketch:
I'm going with a more classic/formal look for the postcard. I want it to be reminiscent of relief printing techniques. I feel like designs for incoming freshman and also donors often pander to the audiences with bright, bedizened layouts overrun with the school logo. I want the austerity of this card to stand out.
As far the actual ad copy goes, I'll have to wait until I have a little more information from the Writing Center.
Here are the final designs for both audiences:
The design targeted toward the donors wasn't as "austere" as I imagined. I think both the cards, however, merge classical and modern design well. The limitations imposed by of The Writing Center inform the design. The fonts they specified, most significantly, informed the direction of the design. The Writing Center's font is Dream Orphans; so the other fonts I chose had to complement that.
I used an Art Nouveau-esque embellishment2 for the student card and a more classic embellishment for the donor card. I wasn't able to really check off many items on my Master Image List3 for the class but I'll try to do more as I get more comfortable using the grade sheets and adhering to the project specifications.
1 To create 500 cards (250 for each demographic) 7" x 5" postcards in CMYK with a full bleed on 80# coated paper would cost $141.10.↩
2 All images used in this project were created by Alexander Sheppard.↩
3 The Master Image List is a checklist of images I'm required to use for my class. This project used two reverses (logo and text on front) and two vector art (.ai) files (top half of each card was created in Adobe Illustrator and brought to Indesign as one image).↩
