I am curious how DMers produce what appear to be a scribbled note on a yellow legal pad and turn this into a direct mail piece.

I am thinking of doing this but not sure how to pull it off technically.

Thanks,

Doug

IIRC, Bill Glazer did a very successful piece this way. Believe he did it on white paper with lines and then had copied onto yellow paper.

Regards,

-Mike

Joe Crump had a successful piece that way too, although I don't know where he had it printed.

I haven't created work in this way (yet).

However, if I was printing it with real handwriting -- if I didn't have the actual legal pad paper stock (pre-lined with margin/writing lines), I would use a suitable tint of process yellow (double sided), and add in relevant notepad and margin lines along with the handwriting.

I'd be inclined to do the handwriting on white paper (with a page paperclipped behind with thick lines as a guide) -- scan in the handwriting, drop out the background and superimpose over the yellow background with lines (that of course match the guide I used for handwriting).

The Bill Glazer one I have in my swipe is from a campaign selling the 2006 Glazer-Kennedy SuperConference (pretty sure Mitch Carson supplied the little planes for lumpy mail) -- came in an envelope with a very large window face showing the plane and free airfare offer (addressing on the other side). This was a "special late registration offer" -- see pic attached.

In this case, they used a font to mimic handwriting with some added squiggles, crossed out bits, margin notes etc -- and printed directly onto lightweight lined legal notepad paper using blue and red ink.

You can get free handwriting fonts at da font dot com, and make your piece in photoshop. You might need to search around for a printer to set it just right on notebook paper. A local printer with an open mind will do you best. If you see a nametag on your printer, you're probably in the wrong place.

Good luck.

Yeah, over 260 fonts in the "handwritten" sub-category under scripts on dafont.com -- one of my favorite font resources.

dafont.com is good for 2 reasons -- (1) you can preview all of the included characters *before* you download just by clicking on the font name; and (2) you can set a custom message to preview when browsing through the fonts to look at any particular letters you need to see/match/confirm in advance.

Some of the fonts don't have capital letters, some important punctuation or numbers, so it's good to know that in advance.

Personally I'd use InDesign for this type of multi-page handwriting project, and import the brush strokes, crossout squiggles etc from Illustrator -- easy to maintain/adjust as you go along (and better fprint quality than a transparent Photoshop file as your final file is vector-postcript based, not a raster file with aliasing.).

You could also scan in a legal notepad background and use it to set your line leading etc -- just don't include it in the final eps/pdf file for the printer.

Doug,

I have done this "in house" for quite awhile, using my laser jet, yellow-lined paper from Office Depot, and handwritten fonts. The result is pretty amazing.

The key is the paper (see attached image).

If you purchase the Deluxe grade yellow-lined paper (20lb weight), you can run through your printer just fine (make sure you test first).

Using Word, mail merge and a handwritten font makes for a very personalized (and impressive) DM package.

Mike

There's a Dan Kennedy student whose doing it well for a lot of DK people.

James Capplemann is his name and you can check him out at:

UpperHandMarketing dot com. (Apparently I can't post links, oh well.)

Doing these mailings can be a pain if you do it on your own due to getting proper lineup of text and line.

I had just gotten an example of this type of direct mail piece mailed to me last week.

It got dumped into my recently started swipe file.

Tonight I picked up some loose leaf filler paper from Office Max to try the same thing. And then did a google search to see if anyone made any paper specifically for this purpose and found this message board.

I'm going to give this stuff a try first (as it's got three hole punches in it) and probably give Mikes legal pad ones a try too tomorrow.

Ostrich99

I just did this one the old fashioned way. I actually scanned in a sheet of yellow paper, brought it into Photoshop and wrote a sentence at a time in a handwriting font.