Make Your Own Postcards Best Practices

How to Make Your Own Postcards

If you decide to create your own postcards for printing and marketing purposes it’s time to take in a few words of advice to improve the success of your efforts. Sending your message or greeting on a card has other steps to consider. By researching and planning how you will design, print and distribute your postcard will increase your bottom line. A postcard is very portable and really packs a punch, considering the low cost of the entire direct mail campaign. When it comes to postcard printing, I recommend choosing a printer that can produce your postcard in brilliant photo colors with a protective coating.

Research Your Market

Try to get in the minds of your target market.

• Are they low medium or high income?
• Do they have children?
• How old are they?
• What is their gender or marital status?

This research will influence how you make your own postcards. For example if you are trying to appeal to a female audience the colors you choose should be feminine.

Research Image Files Online

The first thing I like to do is query google on the key phrase of the project. Then go to “Google images” This can serve as a great idea gathering process. You can research imagery this way for many projects such as posters, promotions, ad theme ideas, etc. What about multiple photos or back printing on a postcard?

Rough Up Your Printing Project

After gathering your research and thoughts, I like to pencil together a rough sketch. That’s right old fashioned pencil and paper! This is one of the most important steps you take. . . uniting all that research into one master plan. Follow with me now and do exactly as I say, your reward will be a higher response rate! So we now have a pencil sketch of your postcard (front and back), what’s next?

Plan and Make a Work of Art

Postcards are not meant to be a brain strain. We need to keep that in mind when we plan how to create the graphics for a super-sonic post card.

Now we need to obtain the graphic building blocks needed to compose and produce professional commercial print quality printable cards. A well engineered design plan will always result in extraordinary commercial printing from your printing services company of choice. All you have left to do before handing this project over to a commercial printer is obtaining legal rights to use printable images for your project. Here are a few of my favorite stock photo sources:

http://www.fotolia.com/
http://www.shutterpoint.com/
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/

Make Your Own Postcards Vector Art File

This is a step you may not want to take. A commercial printing and graphic design company can compose the entire project for a small fee right from your pencil sketch and building blocks you have. In some cases a printing company may offer to create the artwork for free. For example if we take on an order of 10,000 + postcard we will do the artwork for free. We will also give our client the file for future projects.

If you decide to get your hands dirty and make your own postcards print ready file, I recommend using 1 of 4 publishing programs. My Favorites include:

1. Adobe Illustrator
2. Adobe Photoshop
3. Quark XPress
4. Corel Draw

Are You Ready For Commercial Printing?

Regardless of the method used to create your artwork a final hardcopy proof is required both for you and production purposes. So make sure at the end of graphic design a proof is seen and approved by you! Once the approval is made, off the presses we go.

Creating Delighted Customers

The idea here is to talk to each and every person (potential customer) that receives your postcard. A stamped envelope for more information can have a huge response rate. Learning how to make your own postcards will allow you to develop a “create your own postcards kit” of your own.

Good Luck!

Tags: make postcard printing, own postcards, own postcards, commercial print, research, own postcard, create pencil sketch