February marketing pt. 4

Now for the fourth installment in my ongoing series detailing the coming together of my new BadVista flier. When last we left our heroes, we were sitting on a pile of undistributable fucking garbage that defied everyone’s best efforts to get it to at least some semblance of printability. Problems included, but were by no means limited to:

• The screenshots were gawdawful. Too small to get any detail in them, poorly spaced, unreadable blobs of color. Absolute shit.
• Too goddamn wordy, as always.
• Poor spacing in general. The BadVista image only took up a small chunk of its horizontal space, but rendered the rest of the area on that general plane pretty much unusable.
• Everyone who vetted it for me said it looked like a magazine ad. We’ll come back to this later.

Mostly, I just didn’t have a very good vision for it. I was doing a flier because I always do fliers, but I was trying to fit a magazine ad shaped block in a flier shaped hole, and there’s only so much turd-polishing you can do. It was not going to happen.

So I said to myself, “Self, listen. What is it that you sell? Free software solutions to real people’s problems? Well then, fucking find one.” It was actually kind of Lizz’s idea, she said that a word processor was the wrong tool for the job. I, always right of course, said “Like what? It’s just text boxes on an 8.5×11 sheet, I move them around and resize them and stack them on top of each other. What do I need more complex software for?”

Then, on a total whim, I fired up Scribus. I’ve never used Scribus before. My first impression was “Jeez, what the hell do I need all this for? It’s just text boxes for god’s sake.” And as far as that went, I was right. OOo had no problem doing what I was asking it to do, but because I was stuck in the word processing mindset, I was really limiting what I could do.

So I decided to chuck the whole damn thing and start from another viewpoint altogether. Instead of trying to shoehorn my content into a format that was completely unsuitable, I started with the idea of a three-fold flier. And everything fell together like Tetris, baby.

Behold the fruits of my labors (in pdf because wordpress won’t let me upload a scribus document). I welcome your critiques, and if anyone wants a look at the source document, reply to this post and I’ll email it to you. It looks like shit because I don’t know Scribus, I just manually moved stuff around until it fit, which is not exactly Best Practices, so I could really use some cleanup help and general advice. In particular, I don’t know how to get rid of those top green things (came with the template), and I’m still not dead-on when I fold the finished product. But for all that, I’m thrilled with what I’ve gotten done here, I’d rather be 70% done with something great than 90% done with crap. Not a bad day’s work. Let me know what you think.

-pd-