Here's how Laura was able to help her clients avoid embarassment, increase efficiency, and create effective marketing materials.

That's Offensive?

A manufacturer of three-dimensional prototyping printers and I were developing a brochure. This was to be their flagship piece, the brochure that would be included in all the press kits, sent out to everyone who inquired about their company, and given away at trade shows. Needless to say, it had to be perfect.

In addition to being a graphic designer, I am also an experienced proofreader, so I always read through the copy for whatever I'm working on to make sure everything is as it should be. As I was reading the brochure, I stopped cold at a sentence tucked into the middle of the piece:

"The [name of company] 3D printer is the final solution to all of your prototyping needs."

This sentence was shocking because, as any student of history knows, the Final Solution was the name of Adolph Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jewish people--the Holocaust.

I immediately called this to the attention of the marketing manager, who had never heard the phrase before and therefore was untroubled by it. But when I explained its meaning, she blanched and immediately changed the wording.

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Setting Better Business Practices at B-School

I was hired as a graphic designer at the student newspaper of a major university's business school. The place was run like a club house: the editor-in-chief drifted around on inline skates, munching crackers and spouting off ideas for articles; designers frequently rearranged completed page layouts if somebody submitted an article after deadline; and late nights and working all day Saturday were standard for getting the paper out on time. For the writers and editors working at the paper was a blast, but they made the designers' job difficult and frustrating.

The editorial staff had some pretty bad work habits. Once, a writer brought a taped interview in for a designer to transcribe, which took him away from laying out the paper for a couple of hours. Sometimes we waited around idly for articles to arrive, then had to scramble to typeset them when they finally were submitted. And writers would often compose their articles while we were trying to put the paper to bed, asking us to check out their work. We only had three days to lay out the paper before the printer came to pick up the artwork, so things could get pretty hectic with all the interruptions.

There was a complete editorial staff turnover each semester, which meant that we designers had to train new people on how a paper gets put together and try to get them to adhere to deadlines. But since there was no strict deadline policy the new staff quickly assumed the bad work habits of their predecessors.

A few months into the job, I became the Art Director so I implemented some policies to increase efficiency (with the blessing of the editor and the publisher, of course). The first thing I did was to set strict deadlines for each section of the paper. Anything that came in after deadline, except for advertising, would have to wait to be published until the following week. Next, the designers stopped working Thursday nights and on Saturdays; instead, we would work regular office hours on Thursday and stay late on Friday, as needed, until the paper was done. And designers would no longer copyedit and proofread articles as they were being written, and would not take dictation or provide transcription services.

At first there was a lot of grumbling from the editorial staff, but after a couple of weeks everyone settled into the new routine. In addition to making the designers' job much easier, I saved the paper an estimated $5,000 a year in overtime wages and got a quality product out every week in less time and with fewer designers than before. And with set policies in place, the staff turnover issue became less of a problem.

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Photographing Nonexistent Products

A distributor was getting ready to launch his new product lines. We had worked for months on the labels and packaging and now we were waiting for the finished products to be shipped by the manufacturer. But we had to get the catalog and sales sheets printed before the products arrived, and that posed a problem. How do you photograph a product that doesn't yet exist? Easy: fake it in Photoshop.

I started with a photograph of a similar product. I made three copies of the photograph, one for each of the distributor's products. Using Photoshop, I eliminated the labels in the photographs then superimposed images of the labels I had designed, stretching them to fit and blurring them slightly to make them appear realistic. When I was finished, it looked like we'd set up the actual products for a photo shoot!

The catalog and sales sheets were finished at about the same time the product arrived from the manufacturer. The client was able to attend an important trade show with both his products and the marketing materials to promote them!

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