Chocolate promos?

Besides business card and letterhead, have you ever created any kind of promotional mailer piece for yourself as a designer? So much emphasis has been placed on the online portfolio of late that I feel physical, tangible methods of self-promotion have fallen by the wayside among designers entering the industry today. But that’s exactly why a well-done mailer can catch people’s attention. Ella Tjader, a freelance illustrator and Sessions grad, had tremendous success with a pack of postcards she sent out featuring her illustrations. They were so beautiful you actually wanted to use them to send postcards to friends. Therefore, they were just as “viral” as an online campaign might have been. By the way, Ella is interviewed in our Experts section and discusses many tips for getting into the biz. Check her out here.

Graphic design student Katherine Murphy agrees: “I personally love promo pieces and I tend to collect them, picking them up at shows, gallery spaces and coffee shops. I think because I’m older—forty-five—and coming at the tech side of life late, there is something much more real for me about print media that I can touch, hang on my bulletin board, and so on. I would think a knockout promo piece strategically mailed or positioned would be well worth the investment of time and resources.”

Whether you grew up in age of online promotion or, like Katherine, can recall more tangible times, humans are hard-wired to appreciate a visual-plus-tactile thrill. At times the world feels absolutely overcrowded by promotional freebie crap, and there’s always a fear that you’ll invest time and resources in something that gets thrown into the garbage as soon as it arrives at its destination. The promo pieces I love, though, are the ones that don’t read as promo pieces, just as an appealing, possibly useable object that is a free goodie for me, and not overtly petitioning me to use the services of a certain firm or designer. That’s why I loved getting Ella’s pack of illustrated postcards that showed off her individuality without listing anywhere on the card exactly what services were offered; a link to her portfolio was all that was needed to get my attention and lure me in to check out more of her work.

Other tactile promo pieces I’ve loved: the tiny beaded evening bag given out by designer Catherine Malandrino to celebrate the year 2000; a really good pen that I loved using, which was decorated with a designer’s innovative, abstract use of letterforms; a pack of bubblegum (!!) which was wrapped in a designer’s own take on a sort of haute-bazooka comics concept. I think I would love to get something chocolate that came in a really cool, somewhat durable package design that could be reused to hold other things—paperclips, and so on. That’s the kind of thing that stays on someone’s desk and gets used long after the candy is gone.

What have been your favorite promo pieces? What would you love to get? What might you send out to promote your own work?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 4:04 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.