Chapter at a Glance
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To market your product, service, or organization to customers, clients, and members, you will often need to produce eye-catching printed materials. In fact, every written communication should build confidence in your company or organization by representing you in a professional, stylish way.
Even if you want to create materials such as flyers and brochures for personal reasons, you can still benefit from the ideas and techniques discussed in this chapter. Whether you are creating a flyer to appeal for information about a lost pet or a brochure to announce a sports team’s practice times and game schedules, we will give you the skills you need to produce a well-designed, carefully laid out publication.
In this chapter, we start with a discussion of ways to build a brand through the consistent presentation of printed materials such as business cards, letterhead, envelopes, and business forms. Then we demonstrate how to use Microsoft Office Publisher 2007 to create flyers and brochures, both by using the many templates provided by Publisher for this purpose and from your own creativity. In the process, you learn more about formatting, design, and layout.
See Also
Do you need only a quick refresher on the topics in this chapter? See the Quick Reference entries in Marketing Your Product, Service, or Organization.
Important
Before you can use the practice files in this chapter, you need to install them from the book’s companion CD to their default location. See Using the Book’s CD for more information.
Troubleshooting
Graphics and operating system–related instructions in this book reflect the Windows Vista user interface. If your computer is running Windows XP and you experience trouble following the instructions as written, please refer to the Information for Readers Running Windows XP section at the beginning of this book.
The brand of a company or organization is its identity. It includes the name and logo, the fonts and colors used in materials sent to customers or members, and the design of those materials. It even encompasses the feeling you want the people you deal with to have about the product or service you provide. For maximum effect, your brand should be evident on all the materials you use to communicate with your customers or members, such as your business card, printed and electronic letterhead, envelopes, Web site, and product packaging, and on business forms such as applications, estimates, invoices, purchase orders, and statements of account. This helps to build and maintain brand awareness.
Large companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually establishing their brand by means of advertising and media campaigns. The desired result is a brand that is recognized by potential customers and elicits certain assumptions and expectations about the company or product. Some brands, such as Microsoft and Disney, use the company name to evoke a response, whereas others, such as McDonalds (the golden arches) and Nike (the swoosh), use a trademarked icon to connect with their customers.
See Also
For information about trademarks, see the sidebar titled Trademarks and Service Marks, later in this chapter.
You might never engage in an advertising campaign with the sole purpose of building brand recognition. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay close attention to the identity you create and what it says about you. Your brand can be a valuable marketing tool, and to the extent that you succeed in identifying your brand with products or services that people want, it can be a valuable asset. Even a local organization such as a homeowners’ association or children’s playgroup can benefit from a brand that instantly identifies the source of materials and their importance to their recipients.
A logo is a graphic or text or a combination of the two that identifies a company or organization—or its products or services—in a unique way. It is used in addition to or instead of the name in printed and online materials and is part of the effort to present those materials in a consistent way that promotes brand recognition.
Because your logo represents your company or organization and will probably be used in different ways, bear in mind the following when designing your logo:
You want to distinguish yourself from your competitors with a tasteful, memorable design.
The logo should be recognizable at a glance, which rules out most photographs or complex graphics.
The logo should be flexible enough to work in several sizes (such as tiny on a business card and large on the side of a delivery van).
It should work in black and white or in color. Limit the number of colors, and avoid gradients that might be hard to render in processes such as silk-screening.
It should work on hard surfaces (such as building signs) or soft surfaces (such as T-shirts).
Unless your company or organization is associated with a specific culture or religion, your logo should avoid images or fonts that imply such connections.
If you don’t have graphic skills or access to a graphics program in which to create a logo, you can design one by using a base layout from the Design Gallery and then adding elements such as shapes, WordArt, and regular text. You can also find logo-design services and do-it-yourself logo design programs online.
See Also
For information about inserting elements from the Design Gallery into a publication, see Working with Pre-Designed Visual Elements in Chapter 2.
In Chapter 3, you learned how to vary the look of a publication by changing the color scheme. Color can be an important component of your brand. Equally important is the combination of fonts you use. Publisher makes it easy to experiment with font combinations by providing an extensive library of font schemes. These schemes consist of a compatible heading font and body-text font that, in conjunction with the color schemes, provide you with many ready-made ways to change the look and mood of a publication.
As with color schemes, you can assign a font scheme to a publication as you create it in the Getting Started window. In an existing publication, you can switch to a different font scheme in the Font Scheme area of the Format Publication task pane. You can also apply fonts from outside of the current font scheme to selected text by clicking the font you want in the Font list on the Formatting toolbar.
See Also
For more information about font schemes, see Solving Organization Problems in Chapter 5.
Of course, you are not limited to the font combinations provided by Publisher. You can format selected text or styles with a non-scheme font at any time.
See Also
For information about varying the look of a font by changing character attributes, see Formatting Text for Visual Impact in Chapter 2.
You can store text or graphics that you might want to use in more than one publication in the Content Library. You can use an item from the library as-is or insert it from the library and then modify it, instead of having to create it manually. For example, suppose you combine a graphic and text to create an attractive element that advertises your Web site. You can store the element in the Content Library so that you can use it in other publications.
In this exercise, you will first create an envelope and a custom logo, and then select colors and a font scheme to establish consistent branding. You store the logo in the Content Library, and then create a coordinating business card by adapting the logo and applying the chosen design, color, and font for a consistent look.
Note
USE the Icon and Name graphics and the BusinessCard, Envelope, and Invoice publications. These practice files are located in the DocumentsMicrosoft PressSBS_Publisher2007MarketingMaterials folder.
Note
BE SURE TO start Publisher and display the Getting Started window before beginning this exercise.
In the Publication Types list, click Envelopes, and scroll the center pane to get an idea of the range of available designs.
In the Classic Designs category, click Crossed Lines. Under Options in the right pane, set the Color scheme to Waterfall and clear the Include logo check box. Then click Create.
Publisher creates an envelope with the selected design, and inserts the company name and return address from the active information set.
Click the border of the blue text box, and press the
key. Then click either of the blue lines, and press .Because the two line objects were grouped, selecting and deleting one of the lines deletes both of them. The envelope design now includes only the return address and the address area.
On the Objects toolbar, click the Design Gallery Object button, and in the left pane of the Design Gallery, click Logos. If necessary, enlarge the gallery window by dragging its border so you can see the logos in the center pane.
In the center pane, under Additional designs, click Crossed Corner. In the Options pane, experiment with the Graphic and Lines of text options, observing the changes to the design thumbnails. Finish with Graphic, set to Include, and Lines of text set to 2. Then click Insert Object.
Publisher inserts a logo containing a placeholder graphic (in the shape of a pyramid) and placeholder text (Organization Name) in the center of the envelope.
Drag the logo to the return address area in the upper-left corner of the envelope, and then change the Zoom level to 200%.
On the Arrange menu, click Ungroup, and then click a blank area of the publication to release the selection.
You can now change the individual logo elements.
See Also
For information about grouped objects, see Connecting and Grouping Shapes in Chapter 2.
In the return address area, select and delete the pyramid, select and delete the Organization text box, and change the word Name to Caterers.
Notice that the font of the word Name is formatted as All Caps, and this formatting is automatically transferred to the word Caterers.
On the Objects bar, click Picture Frame, and then click Picture from File. Drag to draw a frame in the empty space to the right of the return address. In the Insert Picture dialog box, navigate to the DocumentsMicrosoft PressSBS_Publisher2007MarketingMaterials folder, and double-click the Name graphic. Move the inserted company name graphic to the upper-right quadrant of the crossed lines. Then move and size the graphic to fill the width of the quadrant.
Repeat step 9 to insert the Icon graphic in the upper-left quadrant, sizing it to about the same height as the name.
Change the color of both lines to Accent 2 and the color of the word Caterers to Orange (by selecting it from the More Colors palette). Then move the Caterers text box, to left-align the word Caterers with the word Fourth.
Select the two graphics, one text box, and two lines that form the new envelope logo (hold down the
key as you click each one), and group them.Right-click the group, and then click Add to Content Library.
The Add Item To Content Library dialog box opens.
In the Title box, type Fourth Coffee Logo. In the Categories box, select the Business check box. Then click OK to store the item in the Content Library.
The Content Library task pane opens, displaying a thumbnail of the item.
On the envelope, click inside the text box containing the return address, press
to select all the text, and then change the font color to Accent 2.In the Content Library task pane, click the Other Task Panes button, and then click Format Publication. In the Format Publication task pane, expand the Font Schemes area.
In the Zoom list, click Whole Page. Then click various font schemes to see the effect on the publication, noticing that all the text in the envelope publication changes to reflect your selection. Finish by selecting the Facet scheme.
The envelope is complete. Now create a business card to match.
Display the Getting Started window, and create a business card with the Crossed Lines design, the Waterfall color scheme, the Facet font scheme, and no logo. Then delete the blue text box, and ungroup the blue lines.
On the Objects toolbar, click the Item from Content Library button. In the Content Library task pane, point to the Fourth Coffee Logo item, click the arrow that appears, and then click Insert. Drag the inserted logo to the upper-left corner of the business card, and then ungroup the logo object.
Delete the green vertical and horizontal lines from the inserted logo. Move the vertical blue line to the right and the horizontal blue line down, to replace the green lines. Then change the color of the lines to Accent 2.
Select and group the two graphics, one text box, and two lines that form the business card logo, and then add the logo to the Content Library.
Move the two text boxes containing the contact information to the right, to align the left edge of each box with the vertical line, and up, to center-align with the name and title boxes to the right.
Decrease the font size of the address and contact details to 6 pt, to bring the e-mail address into view. Change the font color of the address and contact details, and the line color of the line between the name and title to Accent 2, and change the font color of the title to Orange.
Use the techniques you have learned to create other items that coordinate with the business card and envelope you created in this exercise. For tips, refer to the BusinessCard, Envelope, and Invoice publications in the DocumentsMicrosoft PressSBS_Publisher2007MarketingMaterials folder.
