The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : Printed Matter Can Have a Professional Look
Nothing taints a small business with a sense of failure faster than poor-quality printed materials. If the letterheads and business cards and brochures look amateurish, customers are likely to have doubts about the quality of the goods or services being offered.
With a personal computer and an inexpensive program or two, any business can project a professional-looking image to its customers.
My Brochures ($60) from MySoftware Co. of Menlo Park, Calif., makes it easy to make your own brochures and mailers. And it works well with a large selection of patterned papers available from several sources.
Communique InstantImage Software Templates ($25) from Avery Dennison Office Products of Diamond Bar offers a broad, consistent approach to business printing needs, though it lacks some of the brochure features of My Brochures. Communique has templates for a family of patterned forms for matching letterheads, brochures, business cards, envelopes and labels.
Yet another way to impress your customers, or merely make your own life a little easier, is offered by ClickBook ($70) from BookMaker Inc. of Palo Alto. Available for both PCs and Macintoshes, it lets you turn word-processing files, spreadsheet tables and even database lists into any of 20 different sizes and styles of booklets.
My Brochures is a Windows program that combines pre-designed brochure formats with built-in simulations of pre-printed brochure papers from several manufacturers, including Paper Direct, plus a library of graphics images to give you everything you need. There’s even a spelling checker.
Brochures seem simple enough. Typically, they are printed on both sides of a letter-size sheet turned on its side and then folded into thirds. You’ll even find some helpful brochure templates in the full-featured word-processing programs.
But it is a lot easier to make a brochure in My Brochures than with a traditional word-processing program, because all of the hard formatting work is already done for you. That includes the ability to print mailing addresses sideways on the middle panel to turn a brochure into a mailer.
Existing text files can be poured into the three vertical columns of a brochure, or you can type in original material directly on the screen. You can also add graphic images either by drawing them with the program’s simple drawing tools or using images from the clip art collection included in the program. You can also add photographs or other images from scanned art or CD-ROM collections obtained separately.
The program comes with an excellent, well-illustrated manual that takes you through all the steps and explains them in enough detail so you can learn how to create your own original designs.
Avery Dennison’s Communique InstantImage templates offer more modest capabilities, but they cover a much broader range of business printing needs.
As the name implies, this is not a program, but a set of templates to be used with your existing word processing software. The package includes templates for Microsoft Word for Windows, versions 2.0 and 6.0 (there were no versions between those two), WordPerfect for Windows versions 5.2 and 6.0 and WordPerfect for DOS version 5.1.
I tested the Word for Windows 6.0 templates. The installation program on the diskette placed 110 templates into my Word for Windows program so they were available to use every time I opened a new document. You wouldn’t want to use all of them, however. Really what you have are 18 choices: three styles each for six different patterns of Avery Dennison stationery, brochure stock, envelopes, business cards and labels.
The intention is that you pick one of the 18 design combinations and then customize it to your needs. The instructions are skimpy and assume that you already know how to use your word-processing program and understand how a template works.
I found several features in several templates that didn’t work as they should have. One of the “bullet list” formats usually produced odd results. Text frames that were meant to contain the address and telephone number of a business were superimposed on each other in one template, making it appear as if they didn’t work. These kinds of flaws are easily corrected by a proficient user who understands templates, but they would baffle a novice.
ClickBook can take almost any file you can print from a Windows program and convert it into several styles of booklets, ranging from pocket-size to 5.5 inches by 8 inches, or into a tri-fold brochure such as those described above.
It does this by creating a new printer driver file for your Windows programs. Then you can choose the ClickBook printer instead of your regular printer when you want to make a booklet. It is ideal for producing professional-looking instruction manuals for your products, or even a small catalogue.
Converting your own customer list or personal phone list into a handy pocket-size booklet for traveling would be another good application.
Using it well takes some experimentation, especially with spreadsheet and database files, because you have to manually format a file into the appropriate pages beforehand. That may mean converting normal-size type into a larger size if you want it to be legible after ClickBook shrinks it down for a small booklet. It will probably take a while to print, too, while Windows churns away re-scaling the type to fit the ClickBook printer requirements.
Installation is easy but not foolproof. The program indicated it was automatically creating the proper printer driver for my Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4M, but it didn’t, and pages were printed atop one another.
The fix was easy, though. I just had to run ClickBook’s printer driver creation routine so that it could decipher how the printer really fed the paper.
