Direct Mailer Reflection

 

This week in my PR Publications class, I designed another direct mailer similar to last week’s but with a different stakeholder in mind. As you may remember, the class was asked to design these direct mailers as if we were designing for OU’s Prospective Student Services. We chose a stakeholder to whom we would likely send these publications.

For my first publication I chose to target students from southeastern Oklahoma, which is where I am from. I chose this area because I understand the issues and concerns that these students have with coming to a larger university such as OU because I went through them as well. These students are an underrepresented group at OU and they should be targeted and encouraged to apply more than they probably are.

This is my design for a direct mailer to be sent to prospective students from southeastern Oklahoma encouraging them to apply and to get in contact with their recruiter for help throughout the application process. 

 

 

This week, we were supposed to choose another stakeholder related to the one that we chose last week. I chose to target high school counselors because they play an important role in these students’ college application processes. Because several students in this area are the first people to attend college in their family, they need help with applying for housing and financial aid among other things. Counselors should be aware of the deadlines to apply for these types of things as well as the opportunities offered to students before they enter their freshman year.  

Since the last draft of my mailer, I changed mostly the color and fonts used in my publications. I think that I could play around more with the backs of both of the mailers in order to make the design more sleek. I especially like the front of the mailer targeted toward students.

In designing these mailers and working with Photoshop and InDesign, I have noticed several differences and similarities. The biggest difference between the two is in how InDesign is more text based. I also feel like in InDesign there are not as many options to play around with the graphic elements of a design. However, both programs offer ways to design a document with both text and graphics rather easily.

I personally think that I like Photoshop better than InDesign even though I think InDesign is easier to use. I just like that with Photoshop it is much more useful to be able to just layer everything on top of each other and to be able to see (or un-see) anything at any given time. This makes the design process easier to be able to simply be able to focus on one thing at one time.