Our green and cost-effective letterhead hack

Once we settled on ‘BIPO’ as our primary brand, our graphic designer did a wonderful job of creating our business identity around the brand. On the advice of our branding constultant (”no logo images to clutter it up…you’re introducing a new brand, focus your education efforts on that alone…“), We went with a clean and simple approach that puts “BIPO” in white lettering across a bold, black horizontal stripe. We applied “the BIPO stripe” to everything from business cards, to index cards (more on these later), to letterhead.

You can see the final result on my business card, which appears below. A full size card is available on IMetMatt.com, my $7 I-forgot-my-business-cards insurance policy.

When it came to letterhead, though, we quickly noticed a problem. The big, bold, black stripe sucks up a whole bunch of ink. I’m trying not to print everything these days, but we still print quite a bit. And so do our clients. I don’t want to spend any unnecessary dough on toner, and I certainly don’t want my clients running for new toner cartridges every time they print a letter from the firm (imagine the brand impact that would have).

Everyone agreed that we didn’t want to scrap the design – we loved it, and wanted to save it. So we brainstormed the problem a bit. We used the BAW to map out our document creation workflow and, ultimately, came up with a simple solution that is working out perfectly.

First, a bit of background on our document creation workflow.

We use NeoOffice to generate all of our documents based on templates that include the logo info in the header and footer.

A quick aside – I’ve used darn near every word processing program out there for the mac (yes, we’re all mac), including Office and Pages, and NeoOffice is, in my opinion, hands-down the best available. It’s pdf creation is lightning fast, and it can open and save-to nearly every file format on the planet.

Once the document is created in NeoOffice, we pdf it (with one button ease) and apply a signature in Acrobat. The final .pdf is then e-mailed to the client (unless they have specifically asked for physical copies, which nobody has done yet).

Once we recognized that Acrobat was a critical part of the workflow, the lightbulb went off. Instead of putting the logo info in the NeoOffice template, why not add the image as a background in Acrobat…one that can be turned off when printing.

Interesting….so we modified our workflow around this idea and took it for a trial run. Acrobat makes it easy to add a background, and to set it to display only on screen (see image below). We quickly noticed that this approach worked great on the ink side of things – the stripe simply wasn’t printed.

But there was a major problem – the name wasn’t printed, either. All printed versions of our letters would not have any sort of “BIPO” logo on them, anywhere. Major branding problem.

So we went back to the BAW and eventually came up with the final solution.

Not only will Acrobat allow you to add backgrounds that selectively print, but you can also add watermarks that selectively print (see image below). And you can add both a background and a watermark to the same file. And you can set the background to only display on screen, and the watermark to only display when printed. And vice versa.

I quickly pinged our designer and asked for an inverse of the BIPO stripe. “Make the ‘BIPO’ lettering black and kill the black stripe.” A couple hours later, I had the new file and took the new solution for a trial run. It worked perfectly. We even set up a “batch processing” script in Acrobat that adds both the background and the watermark with the click of a button.

So now, when you get a letter from us, you’ll see the big, bold beautiful “BIPO stripe” on screen, but it won’t cost you a fortune to print it. Check out the two “versions” below.

Want to give it a try? Download this sample letter and open it with Acrobat or Acrobat reader, and then print it. You can open it in your browser using an Acrobat plugin, too.

There is at least one potential gotcha that we’ve discovered. The background/watermark hack works when you’re printing in Acrobat (standard, pro, reader, browser plugin, etc.), but it does not work with Preview (on the Mac). That program seems to ignore the selective display and printing information, and just dumps everything everywhere. I’m trying to figure out if any other programs do the same thing, and how to handle it.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under firm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.