Hotcards, Full Color Printing In The Nation

The world the internet has ushered in has brought with it plenty of ways to make our lives easier. Whether that's doing our grocery shopping or discovering our new favorite band, it's quite amazing what we've been able to achieve. But it's not all good news. Thanks to the sheer number of advertising methods the web offers, it's actually making certain promotional methods less effective, simply due to over-saturation. When everyone is advertising with web banners, everybody starts to ignore them: it's simple common sense.

One designers take on the current state of graphic design and the common shortcomings of many new designers.

I’m going to start this by giving the definition of Fundamentals:

Forming or serving as an essential component of a system or structure

Notice, if you will, the word ESSENTIAL. In relation to the design and print world, you can not achieve a printed piece without the essentials... unless of course you just get lucky.

One designers take on the current state of graphic design and the common shortcomings of many new designers.

I’m going to start this by giving the definition of Fundamentals:

Forming or serving as an essential component of a system or structure

Notice, if you will, the word ESSENTIAL. In relation to the design and print world, you can not achieve a printed piece without the essentials... unless of course you just get lucky.

Actually, M-Bossed put together a whole week of Hotcards!

Recently, our excellent friend Ryan McAbee over at M-Bossed asked me if I’d be interested in talking to him about how Hotcards uses social media to promote our printing services. He had some great questions, which I responded to with many a noble sentiment on the ability of social media to connect us and create online communities that parallel the communities we develop in our own neighborhoods and cities.

Actually, M-Bossed put together a whole week of Hotcards!

Recently, our excellent friend Ryan McAbee over at M-Bossed asked me if I’d be interested in talking to him about how Hotcards uses social media to promote our printing services. He had some great questions, which I responded to with many a noble sentiment on the ability of social media to connect us and create online communities that parallel the communities we develop in our own neighborhoods and cities.

And yup, we're still a printing company.

At a time when printers are supposed to be packing up their things quietly and going home, we got some pretty amazing news. Last week, ICIC (Initiative for a Competitive Inner City) and Bloomberg BusinessWeek ranked Hotcards as 38th on a list of the 100 Fastest-Growing Inner City Businesses in America. They threw a big party for us in Boston, we got to mix it up with other winners from all over the country, and listen to some pretty amazing speakers.

"Business must find a way to engage positively in society, but this will not happen as long as it sees its social agenda as separate from its core business agenda."
- Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business School

Some cool facts on the Inner City 100:

"Collectively, the top 100 inner city businesses employ 10,700 employees and have created more than 6,300 new jobs between 2004 and 2008. Individually, the median Inner City 100 Company's revenues were $6.6 million. This year's winners have a median employee turnover rate of less than 8 percent and 96 percent of them provide health insurance to their workers."

Those are some nice figures, particularly if you're in the printing industry, and particularly, particularly, if you're from Cleveland. These days, all we hear are the stories about how the recession is crushing our industry and our city. But the truth is much more complex, and positive, than that.

Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the other winners fell into the IT, green business, or green technology categories. However, there were a few other printers on the list, proving, if nothing else, that…hmm…printers and inner cities go hand in hand? Simply by default, a lot of printing houses are located in "inner city areas." For a young person starting a print and design business, the space is there, and the price is right.

But in the end, success or failure comes down to a question of community. A printer can't survive, and a city can't survive, unless other small businesses, organizations, and social services survive along with it. Community creates commerce, and vice-versa. So while it's great to get our names on a list, we're not exactly surprised that our industry, or our city, is capable of great things. In fact, we like to think of ourselves as a sign of the times, and a sign of things to come.

As ICIC President and CEO, Mary Kay Leonard, put it, "We are delighted to celebrate businesses like Hotcards that are playing a critical role in revitalizing America's urban communities. Through their achievements, the Inner City 100 winning companies exemplify America's remarkable potential and the road to future economic recovery. These extraordinary companies demonstrate the market possibilities that exist within our inner cities. If we can leverage these possibilities, we can create jobs, income, and wealth for local residents and produce the next chapter of American innovation and opportunity."

So here's to Cleveland! And to the next chapter, available, let's hope, online and in print.

…and a new Design Idea of the Week!

A recent article in AdAge looks at the growing popularity of the long-format ad. "Branded content," in the form of short films and music videos created by advertisers are the sexiest, if not the newest, high-end promotional tool going these days. People want entertainment, not advertising, so why not provide advertising entertainment?

In response to commercials and online ad spots becoming increasing brief and punchy, many advertisers have recently gone in the opposite direction, producing 3-minute, 10-minute, and even 30-minute film-style commercials. The products being advertised act as props or storytelling elements in these long-format ads, which advertisers say are engaging consumers on whole new levels.

All of which got me thinking, why can't the same principles of long-format, narrative-based advertising be applied to print? A brochure could be a novella. A catalog could be designed as a comic book. The difference in production costs should be negligible, if anything, so stop advertising and start entertaining!

Check out a brand new Design Idea of the Week for tips on how to create your own long-format print ad.

A great promotional tool for any type of event.

Summer's on its way, which means festival season, tons of concerts, sporting events, and huge parties/productions. People are also traveling, and spending money on tourist destinations. All of which have one thing in common: ticket buying.

We might be on the way to a future of digital tickets handled exclusively by our cell phones, but that doesn't mean it's time to stop thinking about ticket print design. In fact, as if in reaction to the digital trend, some organizers are taking ticket design to the next level with special runs of commemorative ticket printing.

This summer, for example, Lollapalooza introduced a collectible 3D festival pass. The beautifully designed tickets were produced to act "as a token of your kick-a#% Lolla weekend," and were printed in a limited edition run that sold out almost instantly.

Any event coordinator or producer can build the hype for an event by designing and printing high-quality event tickets and selling them as an advanced promotion. These special tickets act as a fan's first peek at the design aesthetic behind an event, and printing a limited edition run can work to speed and increase early-bird sales, which is always a good thing.

Another victory for tactile technology.

Living life online is all well and good, but we have to strike a balance between the lives we live on Google, Facebook, Reddit, Flickr, and YouTube, and the life we live in our bodies, out of doors and away from the computer. Otherwise, we’re all gonna end up like those sad people in WALL-E or Surrogates.

As digital technology becomes increasingly accessible and integrated into our everyday lives, balancing between the two worlds is becoming more and more a choice that we have to actively participate in. We have to decide what we want from our globally-connected, high-speed, content-rich digital world, and what we want from our physically active, movement-oriented, sensory-rich world.

As such, we’re finding ourselves immersed in a culture making choices between certain technologies that deepen our experiences in the worlds we choose to inhabit. And over the last few years, we’ve been seeing an interesting move in the direction of choosing to embrace and preserve certain tactile technologies that have been challenged by new digital iterations of the services they provide.

Looking back on 40 years of green thinking.

The world celebrated Earth Day last week, on April 22nd, and I noticed that a lot of printers ran special green printing promotions, or blogged about sustainable printing. But I hesitated to post about the day because, for printers, every day is Earth Day.

In our industry, we don't have the luxury to ever stop thinking about our environmental impact, to stop learning about how we can reduce that impact, or to ignore our role as environmental stewards.

That being said, an interesting question might be: what can printers do to improve the experience of Earth Day in their communities? It's a great day to hold events like community cleanups, and to share knowledge about environmental issues, but an even more interesting suggestion was implied by an Earth Day article on the AIGA website this year, in which author Phil Patton posed the question: "Why is there no simple single symbol or badge of environmentalism, like the peace sign?"