Direct Mailer Reflection

For our direct mailer assignment we were asked to create something that would draw prospective students to the University of Oklahoma. I took this opportunity to advertise not only OU in general, but also Gaylord College. This was something I took very seriously because I would have really liked to personally receive this when I was in high school.

The reason I selected my stakeholder to be young women between the ages of 16-19 living in rural areas was because that’s the category I fell into when I was in high school. Like I said before, I didn’t have a lot of encouragement to attend OU and doing so was kind of out of the ordinary. I really wanted to focus on letting these students know that this school and college in particular are open to EVERYBODY, not just people living in big cities or suburbs.

I was really excited to see what I created with my first draft of the direct mailer and thanks to the feedback I received I was able to tweak it to make it even better. Unlike InDesign, I was not very comfortable with editing images or even adding text so when I created my first draft I was really surprised with the quality I ended up with.

Even though I wasn’t very confident going into this assignment, I can now say I feel much better about working with Photoshop. I almost feel as if Photoshop has a simpler way of editing and creating things and that made it a tad more easy to work with. I felt as though I didn’t have to spend nearly as much time editing on Photoshop as I did with InDesign and that was nice.

If I were to start over with this direct mailer assignment, I think I would like to try targeting a different group of students. Perhaps maybe students looking to join the Greek community or maybe students who did NOT have relatives who had previously attended the university. These were also two other categories I fell into in high school so I want to help other people like myself get to know about this university as well.

I really enjoyed creating this design and I hope it would do well if ever given the opportunity to help encourage future prospective students!