Finishing the Direct Mailer

Photo from Pexels

Midterms week has been absolutely insane. With so much going on, it was nice to have a creative escape and finish the direct mailer from last week. 

The direct mailer has been a challenging project through and through. Like I stated in my previous blog post, I had strong feelings about this project. It gave me some real insight into what I want to do in my future career. Agency work probably wouldn't be a good fit for me because I want to communicate for something in which I am invested. For the record, I believe in the University's mission and always want to help in someway to further its mission. Now, I digress. 

I spent the class on Tuesday working on what I had created last week. Each of my direct mailers had one of the two residential colleges on it. One was to be marketed to the legacy Sooner parents and one to the legacy freshman wanting a community on campus. 

The Legacy Parent direct mailer

I started with an image of the exteriors of each respected residential college on each mailer. I changed their opacities and then placed interior shots on the fronts. I then placed my respected messages on each one. I was unsure of this so I got rid of the background images and just incorporated as a standard image with the interior shots. The direct mailers were starting to get where I wanted them. I asked my instructor for his thoughts and he told me to change some positioning, which helped their look immensely. I also changed my messages from "Living the Sooner spirit" to "Starting a new Sooner tradition" for the legacy parent direct mailer and "Community" to "Creating a Sooner Community" for the student direct mailer. 

I worked on the back side outside of class. On the back, I placed the crest of each respected residential college. I lowered their opacities to about five percent. On top, I placed the address of OU Residential Colleges and my call to action, with icons, below, starting with following on Facebook and Twitter and then moving to going to the website for a virtual tour and actually applying. I played around with the fonts until I found a good combination. Gill Sans, I decided, complemented Baskerville, the font used by OU Residential Colleges in its logo. I looked at the Residential College website and wrote a short bit of copy describing the residential colleges' function, each copy geared to its respected public. The back of my direct mailer was close to where I wanted it to be.

 

On Thursday, I came to class with a nearly completed project to get some critiques. My instructor advised me to change the order of my calls to action and to fine tune my copy. Once that was completed, I was finished with this project. 

With this project under my belt, I feel like I really expanded my knowledge of Photoshop and applied the principles of design. Designing direct mailers in the future won't be an issue at all.

The Student direct mailer

I am so happy this week is over. Spring break is next week. I will be going Mena, Arkansas, via Talimena Drive from Talihina. It's not much, but I'm excited nonetheless.