Welcome to this guide in postcard printing. In this particular article, I will show you how to get great looking color postcards just like those professional postcard samples with only a shoestring budget. That is correct! Even with a shoestring budget, you should still be able to pull off a decent bout of postcard printing if you just know the right things to do. So let me teach you how by giving you these tips on how to design and print your color postcards cost effectively.
Do your own postcard designs. One of the first things that you must realize when trying to create custom postcards is that paying a designer or layout artist is expensive. It will cost you a hundred or so bucks for a professional designer to create a marketing postcard. So if you have a shoestring budget that might be a tall order for you to accomplish.
The best way to solve this problem of course, is to do your designs yourself. Trust me, it is not that really hard to design a simple postcard. So do not spend the money for a designer if money is tight for printing. As long as you have a healthy imagination, your own design abilities should do fine.
Getting design materials for free. Next, besides cutting the cost of the postcard designer, another way to get great looking postcards on a shoestring budget is to get all your design materials for free. Below are a few specific things you can do to get several of the most important design elements in postcard printing for free.
The image - The cover image is one of the first things that people see in your postcards. To get this for free and not have to pay a photographer, all you have to do is to take your images yourself. Just borrow a digital camera and start taking pictures. It is easier than you think and since it is digital, it is so easy to delete bad ones and try again.
Besides that though, you might also want to get free images from the Internet. Websites like flickr.com have tons of users made image content that is free for use. There should be plenty of material there that you can use for your custom postcards.
The fonts - In terms of special fonts for postcard design, there are literally thousands of free fonts of different styles over the Internet. Believe me, you will have plenty to choose from for your specific theme. So no worries when it comes to fonts just download the free ones over the web.
The template - Postcard templates can also easily be acquired for free over the Internet. Just go to the websites of postcard printing companies and you will see that they will typically offer a myriad of standard postcard templates for your use. Most of these are free so you will not have to get from your budget to do this.
The software - Finally, you might not realize it, but there is plenty of design software that is free from the Internet that you can use for postcard printing. Software like OpenOffice.org and Gimp are prime examples of open source applications that should help you create a design for postcards with little retraining involved. So if you cannot pay for the expensive software to design postcards, use the free open source ones. They should do the job decently well.
Printing cheaply. Besides designing your postcard basically for free, you can also of course save more money for your postcard printing by basically printing cheaply. You can do this by knowing the right cheap options in printing materials and of course with the wise choice of cheap printers.
Cheap printing materials. To choose the cheapest printing materials, all you have to do is to take out all the luxury options. Full glossy postcard printing of course is out of the pictures, as well as large sized postcard printing. Just choose the smallest postcard dimension with a standard postcard paper for your prints and you should optimize your cost for savings.
Cheap printers - To get cheap printers, you will have to be thorough with your search for a postcard printing company. Go online and compare the different prices and packages that are available from online postcard printing companies. Just choose the best one that fits your budget while at the same time has a good reputation for postcard printing. Do not forget to check the postcard samples, so that you are sure that they have a decent quality printer.
That is how you print simple but great color postcards on a shoestring budget. Hopefully, this helps you out a lot.
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