Hemera newsletter - April, 2004

Call this rant, simply, "Confessions of a Shoe-monger and Font Lover". You'll have to endure my twisted view of the world - I'm standing in a great stiletto - but fonts and shoes have a lot in common: power and impact. Nothing can change, make or break a look or creative concept like a great or totally wrong shoe, or a great or totally wrong font. The artful use of type can set a mood, evoke emotion, add value and create a scene within any creative endeavor. There's absolutely no doubt about the impact that typography has on design. With the choices available today, the possibilities are endless. So if you're looking to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, become a font monger.

Best regards,
Kim Dixon

CEO and president

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Steve Caplin is a freelance illustrator and graphic artist living in London, England. He is the author of three books, and one of the most sought after editorial illustrators in Britain. He doesn't have a degree in fine arts or graphic design, so he often calls himself an "unqualified success", but there's no mistaking his keen eye for composition and his mastery of trompe l'oeil techniques.

Steve Caplin's often-satirical artwork has been published in a long list of UK newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Times Magazine, Evening Standard Magazine and many others.

As a photomontage artist, he is constantly looking for interesting photographic objects that can be inserted, edited and combined into new compositions. Many of his images include people, so he's been collecting images of hands, shoulders, bodies and faces for years. Says Steve: "You never know when you need a new left hand..."

Designers creating artwork for full-sized magazine and newspaper pages require top-notch, high-resolution images. Steve Caplin's unique illustration style has made him a fan of professional Photo-Objects® image collections like AbleStock®. The key benefit of Photo-Objects images is that they have a transparent background, as opposed to the standard, square format found on most other stock photo sites.

"AbleStock.com® is an essential part of my toolkit," says Steve from his home in London. "When a newspaper editor calls me at noon and asks for a new composition to be finished later that afternoon, I have to be able to find what I'm looking for immediately. AbleStock often saves me valuable time by offering a large selection of high-resolution, pre-masked Photo-Objects images. I can download a few of them and get to work right away."

It's not enough for an editorial illustrator to simply have artistic talent - to be successful, you have to master the tools and be able to produce quality work quickly. Magazines typically have enough lead-time to give an illustrator several days to prepare an image, but in the newspaper world, the pace can be brutal.

"The tightest deadline I ever had was 45 minutes for an illustration for the front page of a newspaper," says Steve. "It ended up with me right against the deadline, asking for an extra ten minutes and being granted five. The next day a quarter of a million copies were distributed around the country, each one showing the bits I hadn't finished yet. The day after that it was lining the bottom of the cat litter tray. So much for posterity," he says and laughs.

The example below is an excerpt from Steve Caplin's most recent book, "How To Cheat In Photoshop", second edition. (Please note that while the author uses Photoshop in the following example, the same basic techniques can be used in most image editing applications.)

Combining Bodies
By Steve Caplin

Complex montages frequently require several bodies to be combined to produce the finished character. The brief for this illustration, for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, was to show a wheeler-dealer displaying his financial wares in an open jacket. Choosing a right hand that gestured towards the goods on offer gave me something to do with his right hand - and made his pose more dynamic.

Here are all the bodies used:

Combining body parts

Figure 2:
The arm and jacket were cut off the first figure and rotated to fit onto the man with the shirt. Because the color of the two skin tones was so different, it was necessary to make the hand darker and more saturated - but without changing the jacket color, which matched the ‘other half' of the open jacket.

Figure 3:
The open jacket was copied from the fourth figure, and distorted and stretched to make it fall open even more. The lining was duplicated using the Clone tool to fill the space: the result was imperfect and rather patchy, but it wouldn't matter as most of the texture would end up being covered by the symbols.

Figure4:
The shirt on the second figure was painted out on a layer mask to remove the stray section of arm on the left, and the head. The arm was made to slot into the sleeve hole by painting it out on the mask, which turned out to be a rather easier job than I'd expected. Sometimes things do just work out right first time! The head was simply placed on top and blended with a layer mask, and then de-saturated to match the hand.

Figure 5:
As always, it's the shading that makes all the difference. Shadows, painted on a new layer above the shirt layer help to make it sit beneath the closed side of the jacket; further shadows make the arm disappear inside the sleeve. The hand holding the open jacket is my standard gripping hand, which you've seen before in this book. The company logos were placed on gold-effect backgrounds behind the shirt shadow, so the shadow worked on them as well.

Hot Tip
The hardest part about choosing pieces from multiple bodies is not matching the skin-tones, but the clothing. I had a perfect open jacket, which would have been far easier to use, but it had a herringbone pattern on it that I couldn't match. Plain colors, with as little texture as possible, can be most easily combined.

By cropping the figure at the waist, I could get around the problem of the non-matching trousers (sorry, I can't bring myself to call them pants).

Bio

Steve Caplin (www.stevecaplin.com) is a freelance graphic artist specializing in satirical photomontage. He is a Contributing Editor to MacUser magazine, and a beta tester for Adobe software. He also lectures on Photoshop techniques and the ethics of photomontage.

Steve is the author of three books: How To Cheat In Photoshop, Icon Design and The Complete Guide To Digital Illustration.

In part 1 of this article, we discussed ten important "phase 1" tips to consider when developing your e-newsletter. Above all, we noted the importance of building a permission-based list. From there we touched on how you must communicate timely, meaningful and relevant e-newsletters at expected intervals.

(Missed part 1? View it now...)

In "phase 2", we'll go a step further by looking at what you need to consider once you've established an audience and content for your e-newsletter:

1. Understand your reader preferences and send your email newsletter in all popular formats - text, HTML and AOL-friendly versions. Multi-format deployment is important since it respects all reader preferences. It should come as no surprise that consumers respond better to HTML than text. According to DoubleClick, HTML generates response rates up to 1.7 times higher than text in all industries. Tip - use professional email marketing software; there are many affordable Application Service Providers (ASPs) out there! Or, outsource your email newsletter to e-marketing specialists and let them handle the work for you.

2. Use appropriate, high-quality images. Properly used, images will draw the reader into the newsletter and underline your key messages. Rather than freely mixing vector clip art, stock photos and Photo-Objects in your newsletter, choose a visual style that fits the overall tone. A financial services newsletter might include a small number of monochrome photos for a somber corporate feel, while a newsletter from Laurie's Little Ducklings Day Care might be sprinkled with brightly colored clip art. Tip - Hemera has images that fit every marketing need.

3. Include quick polls or surveys in your e-newsletter. Keep them short and sweet. Perhaps you've got a nagging question of the month - this is the place you can seek its answer. Tip - don't publish the results in real-time; instead tell your readers that you will publish the results in the next issue. By doing this, you'll help build anticipation for that next issue.

4. Avoid sending e-newsletters with attachments or large files. Today's very real fear of viruses means that many people simply don't open emails with an attachment. And a second fear relates to "crashing" - a reality associated with large files. Tip - if you have an attachment you would like to share with your readers, post it on a Web page, and make it a trackable link from your e-newsletter.

5. Because readers can be fickle when it comes to email loyalty, ensure you continually measure and refine your e-newsletter. Monitor click-throughs, open rates, bounce rates and so on, and then respond accordingly. If no one ever clicks on a certain topic, maybe it's time to pull that topic and find a new one! Keep a watch on open rates and unsubscribe requests. Tip - professional email marketing software can be a great tool for measuring response rates!

6. Personalize your email newsletters by using first names and other personal information that may be relevant to the recipient. Personalization does in fact improve response rates, so use it often! Tip - at the very minimum, be sure to ask for first names on your sign-up page.

7. Use enticing subject lines that will make readers want to open your email. This is your opportunity to bring reader benefits to the forefront. Tip - beware of your e-newsletter being mistaken for spam; avoid using words like "FREE" or excessive punctuation like "!!!".

8. Include a real person's name and email address in the "From" line rather than an "info@" type of email. Many would argue that the "from" line is just as important as the subject line. After all, are you more inclined to open an email from someone you know or someone you've never heard of? Tip - be consistent in your "from" line since it also helps to build your brand!

9. Maintain the integrity of your list by keeping it "clean" and free from "list-fatigue". Automated list management makes having a "clean" list relatively painless since it typically manages recipient profiles, bounces and unsubscribes. And preventing "list-fatigue" can be achieved by being sensitive to the frequency of your mailings. Tip - use professional email marketing services or tools that feature automated list management capabilities.

10. Always include an option to unsubscribe and respect those who wish to do so. According to Quris, being unable to unsubscribe ranks as one of the biggest complaints with permission-based email. Tip - make the unsubscribe process easy, and ensure you follow through on these requests.

Bio

Carolyn Gardner (cgardner@cardcommunications.com), Founder & President of cardcommunications inc. (www.cardcommunications.com), has over 15 years of sales and marketing experience. Carolyn, a recipient of the Ottawa Business Journal's 2003 "Forty Under 40" Award, holds a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology from Carleton University and a Diploma in Public Relations from Algonquin College.

It's called Microsoft Word, but maybe it should be called Microsoft Word & Pictures, because "Word" has considerable picture power—if you can figure out where it's hiding. I'm going to help you find it.

It all starts by choosing Insert/Picture/From File. You can import pictures in GIF, JPG, TIF, PNG, WMF and even EPS if you have a PostScript printer.

The picture appears on the page exactly where your cursor was when you inserted it—so if it was in the middle of a line of text, that's where the picture will be.

Resizing: It's easy to resize an image—just single-click on the image, grab one of the black "handles" that appear at the corners and drag it to make the image larger or smaller. Remember, images like GIF and JPG will look fine if you make them smaller, but may look fuzzy when you make them bigger.

Moving: To move a graphic, simply drag it where you want it—just as you do with text. But what if you want the text to wrap around the picture? All the dragging in the world won't do it. For that, you have to double-click on the image to bring up the Format Picture dialog.

Choose the Layout tab, then select the kind of wrapping style and alignment you want. For most images, the square wrapping style is fine.

If you choose a Horizontal Layout of "Other," you can then freely drag the image around the page, and place it anywhere you want.

If you use one of Hemera's Photo-Objects® images, you might want the text to wrap tightly around it for a more integrated look. To do this, choose "Square" in the Format Picture dialog, then select an alignment (in this case we'll choose "left"), then click OK. The picture will now look like this:

OK, that's fine, but we want the text to really wrap tightly around the image. Double-click on the image, click on the Layout tab, and choose "Tight" then OK.

You didn't think you were getting off that easy now, did you? Now we have to use the Picture Toolbar; a single click on the picture will bring up the picture toolbar. Note, your picture toolbar may look different, depending on the exact version of Word you are using).
Click on the picture, and look at the picture toolbar. Click on the little dog icon, and choose "Edit Wrap Points." A dotted red box will appear around the image. Click your mouse on the line to create a new handle to drag—in this case, I created three on the right side, so I could wrap around his hands.

The end result looks like this:

The man in the picture is Hemera Image #0663t0105.

Tips

Word will even wrap tightly around charts and graphs, something that looks especially good with pie charts.
When you use tight wrapping, Word switches to View/Print Layout mode, so it shows the page as it will print. If you switch to View/Normal mode, graphics that have certain kinds of wrapping will disappear. They're not really gone, it's just that they're only displayed in View/Print Layout. So when working with graphics-heavy documents, make sure you're in View/Print Layout mode.
To give your document a more consistent look, stick to one style of images, either photographs or Photo-Objects images, or illustrations. Also be consistent with color—use either full color or grayscale, don't mix them.
You can turn any color photograph into grayscale using the picture toolbar. Click on the image, then click on the "image control" icon and choose "Grayscale."
You can make your document look even more customized by taking advantage of the breadth of the Hemera collection. Searching results in many photos of the same people in different poses. Using the same people throughout a document makes it look more customized and specific, like the pictures were made just for your document.

Bio

Daniel Will-Harris is a freelance writer and designer who lives with his wife and a large family of chipmunks in Northern California. His clients include Bitstream, Corel, Microsoft, Prentice Hall, Xerox and small businesses around the world. His Web site,
www.Will-Harris.com, features his design work, and you can sign up for his entertaining email newsletter at www.SchmoozeLetter.com.