Direct Mailers Final Reflection Post

For our second project of the semester we were asked to create two direct mailers for prospective students of the University of Oklahoma. The process of creating a direct mailer and using photoshop really for the first time this semester made me feel just as I did at the beginning of the semester: completely lost and hopeless. When I first dove in to photoshop I thought the controls would be similar to InDesign and I was sorely disappointed. There are a lot of things to screw up and a lot of different layers and programs to mess around with. To be honest I just this week discovered the full powers of the spot healing brush tool and had way too much fun erasing entire buildings from OU’s campus. After struggling a bit, and trying a ton of different ideas, I am pretty happy with how both of mine turned out. It makes me feel very accomplished to go in knowing nothing and come out with a pretty decent result. I am definitely more confident with InDesign and Photoshop and I definitely feel more comfortable and willing to mess around with different programs and features. I honestly think I still prefer InDesign, but there are a lot of cool things you can do with photoshop (again did I mention the spot healing brush tool I felt like god). If I were to start over I may try a different target audience. My first target audience was pretty broad and, although that’s not a bad thing, it may be fun to have a more specific audience.