Mailer Drafts Reflection

This week we finished the first drafts of our two direct mailers, and I finally feel like I understand Photoshop!

My first stakeholder helped me to define my second stakeholder because I knew that I wanted the second stakeholder to have a strong influence on the first one. I thought that parents who are alumni of the University of Oklahoma would be good to target because they have influence on the student and may even have the opinion that their child should attend the same university they did.

Because of the snow day last week I have only created one draft of the second mailer, but I did get some feedback on my first mailer from our teacher, so it has changed slightly. I liked the general look of the first mailer, but I knew that it could improve. From the suggestions my teacher gave me, I changed the wording, the font and the placement of the large text on the front; I changed the question and the wording on the back; and I added a statement on the back to encourage the student to call to schedule a tour of the building.

At the beginning of the semester I really preferred InDesign over Photoshop because I picked it up more easily. However, I have really started to enjoy Photoshop during this assignment. With InDesign there is more flexibility with the text and it is easy to move around each piece that you place on the document. With Photoshop, though, every separate piece is a different layer. It can be difficult to remember that you have to select a layer in order to do anything to it, but I’ve started to get the hang of it.

Below are the first drafts of my two direct mailers. The top two photos are front and back of the mailer directed toward the prospective student. The bottom two photos are the front and back of the mailer targeted toward the parents of the prospective student.