Getting Personal

Home Office Computing, June, 1999 by Chuck Green

Make a warm and lasting impression with custom follow-up cards

IN A WORLD OF RAPID-FIRE E-MAILS AND RATTLED-OFF FORM LETTERS A personalized follow-up card is one of the most effective ways to stay on a client's radar screen. Whether it's a thank-you note for a referral or congratulations for a promotion, an occasional hand-signed note builds strong relationships and is not only good manners, it's good business.

To make an impression, you don't even need the help of Hallmark. With a desktop publishing program like IMSI MasterClips Publisher (IMSI Software, 800-833-8082, www.imsisoft.com; $40), Adobe PageMaker 6.5 (Adobe Software, 800-833-6687, www.adobe.com; $499), or Microsoft Publisher 98 (Microsoft, 800-426-9400, www.microsoft.com; $100), you can quickly design professional-looking, custom cards. Here's a step-by-step guide.

* Toolbox

Headline font: Copperplate Gothic (Adobe Systems, 800-68-ADOBE, www.adobe.com; $180)

Landscape illustration: from Designer's Club, a monthly clip art subscription service (Dynamic Graphics, 800-255-8800, www.dgusa.com; $50 per month)

The box at the top left 1 is the front cover. Type in your greeting--in this case, Thank You--and, if you choose, your name or the name of your organization. The box at the top right 2 is the back cover, where you can place details such as your company name; a tag line that explains what you do; your street address; voice, fax, and toll-free phone numbers; and your e-mail and Web site addresses.

The box at the bottom left of the page 3 is the left inside panel of the card. You can enter text here or leave it blank. The box on the bottom right 4 holds the greeting text. Below it, leave space for your signature--manually signing the card is a must if you want it to have a personal tone--your name, and the date.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

To create a card, you'll need a program that lets you rotate your text 180 degrees (upside down). For this example, we've used Microsoft Publisher 98.

The first step is to divide the page into four text boxes, one for each panel of the card. Make each box 5 inches wide by 3.75 inches deep, position it 0.25 inch from the edge of the page, and set the text box properties to no fill, no line, and no shadows.

PICK A PICTURE

The landscape artwork in this example is in a separate picture box placed over the text box at the top left (to do this in Publisher 98, select Insert/Picture/From File). With the picture in place, select the box and rotate it so it's upside down (select Arrange/Rotate or Flip/Custom Rotate, and enter 180 in the Angle box). Then, with the picture still selected, move it behind the text box (select Arrange/Send to Back).

Next, select the text box at the top left and rotate it using the same commands that you used with the picture box. Then rotate the text box located at the top left. When you're finished, your card should look like the above example: Everything on the top half of the page is positioned upside down, and everything on the bottom half is positioned right side up.

PRINT AND SAVE

The last step is to print the finished page. Fold the printed sheet lengthwise first, then again in the center to produce a 5.5-by 4.25-inch card. This will fit nicely into a standard A2 envelope (4.375 by 5.75 inches), available at stationery shops.

Once you've created the basic document, save the file in an easily accessible folder. That way, on the next occasion that calls for personal correspondence, you can open the original, make a few edits, and fire off a new note. It takes just a few moments more than sending an e-mail message, but the impression it leaves lasts a lot longer.

--Chuck Green (www.ideabook.com)