Labels & Typography - Noma

Graphic Design isn't always about making things look nice, but it is always about good design. In the above example the design was about being able to convey a lot of information in a small space.

Noma (www.complementary-medicine.com) offers a professional service to qualified practitioners of complementary medicine. One of the products that they import has all the important medical information only written in German. So Noma had to replace the German with English.

We designed and printed these labels on a roll for them. We do a large variety of labels and stickers, including car window stickers, CD/DVD labels, sheets of labels etc.

The difficulty with this job was being able to squeeze all the information into a tight space. This is where you need a professional design package. MS Word only has limited functionality for tweaking the letter/line spacing, point size and kerning etc. which is what you need to be able to do!

We’ve taken a 12 page MS Word contract and squeezed it down to 4 pages while still keeping it readable. To do that you need to be good at using Adobe Indesign.

New Naturalist Newsletter

Newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your subscribers - these may be your customers or just potentially interested parties. Above is quite a comprehensive one we've printed for "The New Naturalist" (www.thenewnaturalistcollectorsclub.co.uk)

This is a great example of a newsletter because:

• the target market, i.e. the subscriber who will read it, has been well defined
• it's published regularly - quarterly in this case
• it provides useful information for the subscriber
• it reminds subscribers about services/products on offer
• the design has been well thought out and excuted.

Sometime customers come to us and they've only really got the content for the first issue. They have so much news to tell their customers and think a newsletter is the answer. A newsletter is a real commitment and so we recommend making sure you have enough news through out the year to justify one - otherwise it might be better do something else, e.g. a one-off brochure.

However if you can commit to publishing a regular newsletter then it can be very effective. If the content is useful, subscribers will pass it on to people they know and so do your markting for you. A newsletter is a good way to demonstrate that you really are an expert in your field - not just because it says so on your website. Keeping your organisation's name fresh in subsribers minds means that when they do need your service they are likely to think of you first.