Because of this we receive many more enquires than orders – so now we’ve developed a promotional scratchcard system that can be played online. And can be delivered at a fraction of the cost of a conventional printed scratchcard.

A promotion can be delivered to your target via a link on your website or in an e-mail and can be used for any number of things:

• target new business prospects
• remind lapsed customers of your existence
• incentivise your staff
• promote a new product or service
• boost traffic to your website

The promotion can be fully branded and customised to reflect your brand values and design themes.
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Maris runs the St Maria Goretti school in Nigeria and  has recently returned from a cultural school trip to the UK. She needs to produce a memorial brochure for parents and children but there’s a catch: the printed brochures need to be in Lagos by the following Friday. Producing a brochure within a week in the UK is not terribly difficult but we know from previous experience there’s a major transport issue, delivering material to Nigeria.

Before making any sort of decision, I need to see what we’re dealing with so Maria e-mails a draft of the proposed brochure in Word. On the face of it, it all looks reasonable straightforward but I need to check transport before commiting – and that can’t be done until first thing Monday.

And Monday is the 5th day of the Lord’s test with every chance of England beating Australia at Lord’s for the first time in years so I can’t miss that. The stewards at Lord’s are very hot on mobile phones so it’s back and forth between seat and the back of the grandstand making calls, trying to resolve the transport issue. Doesn’t look good when it becomes apparent that the brochures would need to be at Heathrow by tonight to clear Lagos customs in time for Friday delivery.

But what are friends for? Another of our Nigerian clients, Rockson Engineering, has a private plane leaving on Wednesday afternoon – if we can deliver brochures to Kensington by 3pm they’ll take them for us. Game on.

Fortunately Freddie destroys the Aussie resistance and it’s all over by lunch – shame in a way, as the atmosphere at Lord’s was simply fantastic.

Back to the office, and by early evening a draft design is on its way to Nigeria. A few corrections and tweaks on Tuesday morning, and by early afternoon we have approval and the PDFs are en route to the factory.

Sterling work by Prometheus to print the brochure overnight and have sheets drying on the floor by breakfast in time for folding and stitching. By midday transport is on its way to collect and deliver safely to Kensington (with a few minutes to spare!).

Late on Thursday I have a call from a very happy Maria.

Well here’s a good place

I’m discussing short runs of between 1,000 and 50,000 copies in this article as once you get into much bigger quantities the machinery required to produce them economically requires a different approach.

Size

Anything you want!

In real life A6 (148 x 105mm) and A5 (148 x 210mm) are the most popular sizes, entirely due to economics. The cards are printed on sheets that are multiples of the basic A4 size so there’s less wastage with these sizes.

Colours

Anything you want!

Again, real life normally limits this to the hundreds of thousands of shades available with 4 process colours but if you really must have a lurid lime green or “that” particular pastel colour then any printable colour is available.

The most common combination is to have full colour (from the process colours) on one side and then just black on the back for the dreaded Ts & Cs.

The Game

Nearly all games are derived from a very simple “match the pictures” formula. This is ideally suited to promotional cards as brand values can be enhanced by using the product itself.

For example, we produced a batch of cards for Eurofighter to be used at the Farnborough and Berlin air shows and the game featured a series of different pictures of the plane itself so it didn’t matter which scratch-off was removed there was always a pic of the plane waiting underneath.

Exactly the same idea can be used whether you’re promoting a bar (match the bottles anybody?) or a comedy festival.

Winners and Losers

As the cards are printed on much larger sheets, the relative quantities of winning and losing cards can be carefully controlled and monitored. Cards can be either randomly shuffled together or kept separate.

Terms and Conditions

These follow a formula: “The British Code of Advertising and Sales Promotion” established by the Advertising Standards Authority. Apart from restrictions on what you can and can’t promote to children, there are two broad categories: with or without a required purchase.

Once we know which category the promotion falls within it’s out with the boilerplate and time to fill in the gaps so it’s not something you really need to worry about as we can lead you through the whole process.

And that’s about all there is to it!

The two serve quite different purposes and need to be treated as such if the resultant product is going to be anywhere near meeting its targets.

Wikipedia describes a catalogue (or catalog) as “an organized, detailed, descriptive list of items arranged systematically….. The word comes from the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women or Eoiae.” And a brochure, rather less grandly as “a leaflet advertisement. Brochures may advertise locations, events, hotels, products, services, etc.”

For normal human beings that translates to catalogues (usually) want to sell you one or more products from a whole list of goodies with prices while a brochure is more of a touchy-feely marketing tool – and if any smarty-pants asks why holiday “brochures” are called brochures and NOT catalogues I shall summon dark forces to make your tea go cold.

Does it matter?

In design terms it is massively important. Catalogue design, particularly if you’re selling off the page is far more of a science than you might imagine.

For a catalogue to achieve its full potential, you’d be wasting your time without an understanding of square inch analysis and product density; knowing where the important “hot spots” are; understanding how to change the pace at which a reader is scanning the catalogue with “stoppers”; how to use “heroes”, and so on and so on.

A brochure is less scientific but no less important for all that. Without the need to achieve specific performance (in terms of sales) from a given area or number of pages, a brochure provides more scope to explore other areas of creativity.

Having said all that the most important consideration for a designer is understanding the difference in such a way that they can produce the best possible designs for any given application.