Can Printed Letters Get You More Clients?

The immediate inspiration came from the title of an e-mail from Jon Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing: Can Handwritten Letters Get You More Clients, referring to a post by Nick Gibson at Six Revisions.

However, a few days ago I'd read a couple of articles about typography for lawyers. There is even a website titled just that, by Matthew Butterick, a font designer turned lawyer, I kid thee not.

Between those two, a realization struck me immediately (well, almost; I was a bit low on caffeine, which I'm remedying right now):

Ekhm, ignore handwriting for now, through I'm positively sure — and without needing to see any tangible proof to boot — that it would get you more clients or 'better' ones.

Rather, before we even look that far, there are still printed letters.

See, on your website and in PDF brochures you're limited by whatever fonts the reader has, not you.

Depending on who you work for, that may be less of a problem — I've once seen a web designer use Caslon of all things, because his readers could mostly be presumed to already have it on their systems anyway (it's an Adobe font that comes with Photoshop). Similarly, most institutional clients probably have MS Office, so most of them would see them if you defined them in the CSS sheet, perhaps with Georgia, Palatino or even Times as a fallback from among the sixteen or so mostly stable set of (relatively) 'web-safe fonts'. (For server-side hosting, embedding fonts in PDFs and other forms of what effectively is font distrubution you'd need a suitable licence from the copyright owner.)

But, on paper, your options are not limited in that way. You have more control. Paper is paper, it doesn't matter what type of hardware or software platform the reader runs. What's best, once printed, it always stays the way it is, for everyone.

Naturally, the visual impression is not the same for everyone, but that's something for you to figure out. The point is, you can do a lot in terms of advanced typography on paper these days, even with the same old MS Office (well, not too old, say: 2013) that everybody else has and to some extent possibly even in Open/Libre Office.

Tracking, leading, kerning, ligatures, widows and orphans and off-black shades, different fonts for headers than for the main body of the document, you name it, it's there. You can also hand-pick just the right paper and envelope and not skimp on the ink or toner since you're probably going to be printing just one or two pages.

You can make it look very, very good, without at the same time making it look over the top — although striking the right balance may, naturally, require some practice and will always be at least a little on the subjective side, just like font pairing (google it).

Of course, use a fountain pen for signatures and any handwritten additions (depending on your demographic, it may be more courteous to write greetings and salutations in hand, and the courtesy might not be lost on the recipient).

Naturally, this is even more important for anyone who does certified translation or anything else that requires hard copy.

What else? Years ago e-mail was exceptional because it was hi-tech. These days, however, paper mail is already exceptional — and thus both special and upscale — in many corporate environments. It's something to put your hands on, to touch, to tear your eyes off of the monitor screen and read like in old times.

Some clients may find it superfluous or pretentious, or both, but others will perceive it as a welcome sign of reliability, seriousness, permanence, stable foundation, a sign that you aren't going to disappear overnight like an e-scammer. Sort of like what still having landline came to mean, at least before the fake kind became popular.

Websites I Liked This Week

No, not for their utility. For the design.

First look at Dragone. I love, love the colours. The blue is otherwordly. The brown, the orange, the purple and the sepia green match it like few things I've seen. The typography is top-notch, although sparing and nothing too fancy (really). I didn't even know you could write blue on blue like that. Yes, you can do things like that with green (more than with any other colour — e.g. look at a dollar bill), brown maybe, but blue I didn't know.

I love the rain (I've seen something similar on one or two other sites recently), and I love the way the slideshow doesn't move. See, slideshows are one of the staple trends in web design these days and have been for a long time. Somewhat recently, with more and more print designers joining the game and client and server bandwidths improving, full-page background pictures have started becoming another. Here, the designer combined both — and removed the most annoying feature of slideshows, i.e. the way they move forward to the next slide. At the same time, he (or she) retained a slideshow's most crucial feature — which is, well, the way they move forward to the next slide.

What else? Look at the 'discover the show' link. Those are called 'ghost buttons'. On the technical side, it simply is a textual link with a border around in, in the appropriate colour. And that's it.

White title text over photos is another popular motif – with or without subtle black shading to make it stand out better (and perhaps blur the edges a little to avoid standing out too hard).

I also like the drodpown menu, the way they managed to make it unobtrusive and elegant, avoiding typical clichés.

Some links retain the old, most classic 'hover' effect (graphical change when you move the mouse cursor over them) — the underline, otherwise switched off. (Yes, by default links are underlined in browsers. Web designers started to play with turning that off the moment it became possible. But it still made for a good navigation effect.)

Look, there is a footer below. The page actually scrolls, in spite of the layout covering all of it. Look what happens at the top. I may be getting paranoid, but I suspect the designer was conscious of how the image would clip if you scrolled to the bottom (at least in the most popular desktop resolution, 1920 * 1080, a.k.a. 'full HD'). Still — text falls on text. The blue gets under the white, or the white gets above the blue. Which is great, because it shows the site was not overdesigned. It doesn't actually look that great when designers assume too much control, it creates a sort of OCD effect.

Individual pages, too, are beautiful. They make use of a certain type noise filter and blur maybe, creating a sort of smoky and a sort of oil-paint-like effect, unique in the scale of teh Interwebz.

---

Now it's time for LeaderBe — a North Scotland consultancy website made by a South England design studio with a lot of talent.

The design is extra simple, though without crossing the line of austerity or minimalism. If there's any design that's both simple and eloborate, this is it.

I like the retro feel, which is actually a popular motif, even a cliché, but on this site it's only light and certainly isn't overdone.

Part of the reason it just simply looks good (and wonderful even) is how they combined the cool ocean blue in the header pic with the overall peach background. Down at the very bottom there's more of the blue. The red accents (tomato/red brick, if I can tell, though it may be India red) are crucial in avoiding boredom and rounding it all out. The compass contour drawing just simply is pretty.

Now, watch the beautiful contrast between the bold italic off-black font on the testimonial (yup, just one, no overdoing it) against the background.

Another important technique used here is the way this widescreen-fitting site will still look good on narrower screens. This is because only the graphical content extends beyond the limits of a certain fixed width (in this case just shy of 1000 pixels, which is also the width I have used on a vaguely similar design).

Navigation bar uses probably the most standard solution these days on minimalistic classy websites and among designers and creatives: the black bar with white font. Except the black is a grungy off shade, so is the 'white', and the font is Impact — which produces a no-nonsense homely (in the good, BrE sense) feel. This is somewhat similar to what LatAm-themed websites do, which fits the travel-related overall visual theme along with an implicit association with tough, seasoned sea dogs.

And look at the pretty text on text pages. The text is important because it actually gets read. When designing a website you need to make sure that your text is pleasant to read. You can become associated with nice, clean text that reads well and is beautiful or with a site on which the content is a pain to read, and which some of the users probably press the back button on.

On a different note, take a look at their What, Why and How. This is similar to the Golden Circle strategy (the one Marta loves talking about), but it doesn't follow the innovative sequence of why, how and what. Instead, it goes for a blend by retaining a feature basis — it introduces and explains the service briefly before moving on to the ideology etc. Still, the 'What' does actually start from a benefit anyway, the first couple of words.

Since we're already talking about the text, content and message — it's so wonderfully concise. In no way is the website content-poor, but at the same time the quantity is perfectly non-tiring. A reader (visitor) is probably in a better, more positive mood if he's not leaving your website tired. This probably affects the visitor's attitude towards the site owner and ultimately willingness to enter into a transaction or business relationship.

---

As a bonus, look at the same designers' website made for 11 New Square, a London chamber of tax barristers.

You can probably recognize the navbar, the midsection may ring a bell, and look at how the large eleven stands out out of the footer as a unobtrusive antiboredom device. The design is still somewhat courageous in employing double slashes (//) as separators in the horizontal list of links.

The patterned background removes the glam factor but also relative austerity of solid whitespace. Still, solid colour gets used as background a lot — something probably quite courageous of a professional designer, where the expectation may be to come up with creative textures rather. Colour palette is simple overall, too. Still, the effect is completely professional, you won't mistake it for a quick and wobbly Wordpress job (though I suppose the site uses some form of a content management system).

The source code is very rigorous — XHTML Strict is not a forgiving standard. It's a pain to validate the code sometimes. The coder did a great job under the bonnet.