The Marketing Professionals’ Arsenal
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21st Oct 2009
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For a marketing professional, there are several design and print marketing materials, which can be at your disposal to be effective in your field. You can use these myriad of weapons to design marketing materials faster, while there are tools that makes your marketing campaign more efficient and cover a wider scope of the market. For your convenience, we have collected the best and most common design and print marketing materials that you can use to help you in your work with marketing. Use these powerful tools wisely, and your marketing campaign should have a higher chance of success.
Design Software:
No marketing campaign can start without an initial concept and design. All marketing depends on the particular angle of attack in terms of the market, and the proper concepts that are used in “forging” that marketing weapon. With this respect, one of the first tools that you should consider is your publishing and graphics design software. There are many out there to choose from, but there are several applications that can be easier to access and faster to use.
For desktop publishing software, you can try using Adobe software like Adobe InDesign and Adobe Pagemaker. Those two are the typical tools that professionals use. However, if you want a simpler type of software that can be easy to manage, you can also try Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Publisher and to a lesser extent Microsoft Word for desktop publishing. They have an easier user interface with wizards, but they are not as powerful as the first two. Barring that you can also try other alternatives such as QuarkXPress. Lastly, if you don’t have that much money, you can try free or open source applications such as Scribus.
After considering desktop publishing software, you also need to know what you want when you go to graphics editing and design. The best graphic design software out there is Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Both let you manipulate images using extensive and powerful tools which can help you design any kind of marketing material that you want. Though they may be a bit expensive to buy. If you want your graphics design software free, you can go for open source applications such as Gimp.
Print Marketing Materials
Now, with your software in place. It is time to think about your marketing materials. There is a lot to choose from in this field. You can print marketing postcards, brochures, fliers, letters and catalogs. In this respect, Postcards and Letters are the most convenient to use. They are already built for quick mailing and both of them can deliver their marketing messages quickly and efficiently. The drawback though here is that most people identify these things as junk mail and throw them away with just a glance. So designing a nice and eye-catching layout for them is crucial for success.
Brochures and fliers on the other hand are a different type of marketing material. These are meant to be given away to people directly. They don’t pass through the postal service. This has its own advantages and disadvantages. Both are designed to impact the reader directly from first glance, and deliver a brief but interesting marketing message. You can cater your distribution efforts by using these print marketing materials since you can give them away at key locations and communities where you want your marketing message read the most. The small drawback with this one is that it requires more time since you have to give them away manually to places. No help from the postal service here.
Great! I hope you learned something about the typical weapons that a marketing professional should know about and use. Remember those concepts above can really help you next time you do some marketing yourself. Good Luck.
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Desktop Publishing
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13th Oct 2009
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Copyright (c) 2007 Dean Barnard
What is desktop publishing? This question was put to me a while back and it took me some time to find an easy answer. The closest I can come to it is this: publishing using computer software is desktop publishing. Why a desktop? Because a personal computer is a desktop, isn’t it? Work like page layout, margins, typesetting etc. which was done manually was being handed over to the computer. Desktop publishing does all those things right on the Desktop as in a printing press. Computers had been introduced to the printing technology way back in the early nineties. But it was a costly affair. Macintosh computers working on exorbitantly priced software were deployed. Obviously only the very big and moneyed publishers and printers could afford the technology. Slowly things started changing. Flash forward to the present and there is an assortment of desktop publishing software available at reasonable and affordable price.
Adobe PageMaker
Adobe corporation has been at the forefront of developing publishing software. They started off with Adobe PageMaker, which remains my most popular application to date. It has slowly lost market share to other new faces, but in the nineties it was way on top of any desktop publishing software. It occupied very less memory, would work on any PC, made no demands on the hardware and was reasonably priced. No doubt offices churned out newsletters, fliers and pamphlets using PageMaker. It has changed hands many times. With Aldous bought over by Adobe, PageMaker had a makeover from a purely Macintosh application to a Windows one. Adobe added the hugely popular postscript language to it, giving it an added dimension.
PageMaker’s easy to navigate menus, color palettes and intuitive tools has added to its attraction. Text can be directly typed and formatted in the layout view. The latest data merge feature helps in importing text, images and graphics from external databases making page layout a fun affair. Provision of color separation tool with authentic print output is an attractive feature of PageMaker.
CorelDraw
CorelDraw is another of my favorites. It was developed for the Intel based computers running windows operating system. Though a vector based software, it was projected successfully as a complete solution for desktop publishing. The feature which I liked most had nothing to do with the software. It was the large collection of clipart which was included with the package which made it almost indispensible. The clipart were so popular that even today one would find them in use. Its latest version X3 includes a powerful bitmap to vector tracing application. Its interactive Fit text to Path tool can be used to manipulate and draw text in various shapes. This is a favorite tool with designers because of its use in all sorts of print applications, from mailers to brochures.
Desktop publishing has revolutionized the print technology. The tedium of manual typesetting has been replaced by a creative and exciting alternative which has boosted productivity to unimaginable levels.

Publishing Software
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24th Sep 2009
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Copyright (c) 2007 Dean Barnard
A decade or so ago the publishing software were distinctly divided into two groups, desktop and professional. On one side were PageMaker and on the other FrameMaker and QuarkXPress. WordStar was primarily used as a substitute for a typewriter albeit as a powerful one. Microsoft was yet to enter the fray with its word, a part of the Office suite. Adobe PageMaker may lay claim to be the most popular ,desktop publishing software application to-date .It used a proprietary postscript software of Adobe which the users found extremely useful. CorelDraw, a vector based software, was projected successfully as a complete solution for desktop publishing. The availability of an extensive cache of fonts and clipart made it popular for small print runs. But these were for small print runs. The biggies of the print industry have publishing software which are much more costly but at the same time with extensive facilities. QuarkXPress has been a long time favorite with the top of the shelf publishers. There are some publishing software which are neither here nor there. Some of them have tools to develop web based material as well as for print. Adobe InDesign is one of those publishing software which fall in the intermediate category.
QuarkXPress
QuarkXPress on the other hand is professional software used for publishing books and periodicals and still continues to be a favorite with publishing community. Its superior workflow management tools are specifically designed to meet large level formatting and page layout. Progressively Adobe brought out a slew of software, meant for the publishing industry. Today, Adobe is phasing out PageMaker in for of InDesign which has features like XML and JavaScript support. Adobe FrameMaker continues to support the professional publishing community.
Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is an intermediary publishing software whose capabilities lie somewhere between Adobe PageMaker and FrameMaker. The software suite is used for designing posters, brochures and newsletters. Released by Adobe it took time for InDesign to find a foothold in the publishing industry due to many reasons. One of them is attributed to its bundling with other Adobe software. Users of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator find it easy to learn and use due to its similarity with their front-end. Its multilingual support and JavaScript capability are some of its unique features. Adobe Corporation sites these features to woo users of QuarkXPress to shift to InDesign. Also, it is promoting this software as a replacement for PageMaker whose further development has been stopped.
Adobe claims that its latest version InDesign CS2 provides faster production for professional layouts. The issue of compatibility with previous versions (which was missing in version CS1) has been resolved in the latest version.
Another reason sited by Adobe for transiting to InDesign is the time taken to familiarize with its interface. The reduction in training time and saving in resources is accomplished by use of familiar tools used in Photoshop and illustrator. InDesign is also targeted at advertising agencies by incorporating a workflow management tool which makes it easier and faster to use in a creative environment.

Free Flyer Templates
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13th Sep 2009
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Software for Creating Flyers
It’s common for businesses to make use of flyers to serve as their advertisement and get the word out on their company’s products or services. If you have searched around for program or software to help in designing a brochure or flyer, you have come across products such as:
Adobe Illustrator CorelDraw Macromedia Fireworks
These three are excellent programs, and if you decide in making use of the software often, it may be worth your money to invest any of these packages. However, if you don’t use the software often, purchasing any of these three becomes an expensive and bit used investment for the business.
Online Resources Offering Free Flyer Templates
Some websites provide free, downloadable flyer templates, which are easy to utilize and let you print the flyer yourself or make a clean copy for use in your printer.
These resources offer different sorts of template categories, so take time and shop around for free templates that work best for you. When you plan on downloading a template to your computer, take time to customize it to suit your business’ individual needs.
Prior to downloading anything, though, make sure to check the Software’s User Agreement. Some sites permit multiple downloads that are free, while others specify a limit. You will want to know and understand any limitations prior to starting.
Microsoft Office
Business brochure (Level design) Technology business brochure (2 – pg, 8.5 x 11, tri-panel) Back to school pamphlet Tri-Fold Brochure Template (8.5 x 11) Technology business brochure (2 – pg, 11 x 17)
Brochure template category choices include:
Utilities/Industrial Telecommunication Technology, Science & Computers Sports Religious/Spiritual General People Nature and Environment Military Medical Legal Special Occasion/Holiday Global
Stock Layouts
Stock Layouts provides lots of brochure templates to buy, but they offer a free sample flyer template. It could be downloaded in the following formats:
PC
Microsoft Word Microsoft Publisher CorelDRAW Adobe Illustrator Adobe InDesign Adobe PageMaker QuarkXpress
Mac
Microsoft Word Adobe Illustrator Adobe PageMaker Adobe InDesign QuarkXPress
Customize the Flyer
Most free templates will let you customize the template so that your product reflects your unique design. You do not have to worry about it looking like every other flyer out there. Customization involves features like:
pictures text company logo
Easy to Use
Most free templates that are available for creating flyers utilize software that is user-friendly. If you are artistic, you will enjoy putting your imaginative talents to work while creating designs for flyers, brochures and any other leaflets. If you are not gifted with creative or artistic skills, the good news is that, you could still learn how to use the software to make quality flyers!



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