3.2: fED Mailers

We’re continuing with our OU Recruitment Services direct mailers, but this time, we had to choose another stakeholder to design for.

For my second, “companion” stakeholder, I’ve decided to target the parents of 17 to 19-year-old who was accepted at OU and comes from a low income family. These parents are wondering what to do about paying off their child’s education but aren’t sure what they can do. They probably already receive information about FAFSA, Sooner Promise, and scholarships, but they aren’t aware of the ways students themselves can get educated about managing their finances alone.

Parent Mailer Draft

This time, I wanted to take a more direct approach while still conveying the same basic information on the student mailer. I decided to go with a fairly standard approach and depict several students alongside a mention of fED. The back is nearly identical to the student version, text-wise, with minor changes to the phrasing.

Reflection

My first stakeholder covers a broad range of people entering OU and involves some rather personal stuff. Likewise, the second stakeholder had to be within the family to make much sense. A lot of stress comes down on low income families who are financially involved in their child’s education, and once you’ve done the basics, it’s hard to imagine what else you can do. Financial Education Services offers a portal for students to learn the many ways they can mitigate the cost of college living, and parents should be aware of it.

In addition to the parent mailer, I did an update on the front of the student mailer. I worked on integrating text and image and opted with overlaying the text at an angle, giving it a feeling of motion. I was hoping to connect with “kids these days,” in a sense, by adding more flair to an otherwise straightforward message. I want it to feel playful but not childlike, friendly but not too familiar. If it’s inviting, it’s more likely people will take another look.

It’s challenging for me to switch to using exclusively Photoshop after all these years. One of the key ways it works differently from InDesign and Illustrator—another big Adobe program used by designers—is how it works primarily with raster images, or images composed of a specific set of pixel. InDesign and Illustrator focus on vector images, which are based on mathematical theory and compressed into smaller files. I won’t go into detail here, but if you’re working with images, I highly recommend reading something like this article about explaining raster and vector to clients (though really, it does a good job at explaining it to anyone). I’d definitely say I prefer InDesign’s somewhat complicated system to Photoshop, since I tend not to edit photographs much. I’m more of a “hire a photographer” designer, what can I say?

Check out my next post for a quick look at Chapter 2 of Designing for Emotions by Aarron Walter!