Whether you're using Linux or still stuck on Windows or Mac OS X, there are great free and open source options. Many a church bulletin and nonprofit fundraising letter have been put together in Publisher (or even Word).īut you don't need a proprietary tool to design a great layout. And Microsoft Publisher still may take the prize (at least for small businesses and individuals) as one of the most-used publishing platforms, owing to its low cost and ease of use to people already familiar with the Microsoft Office suite. The world of proprietary software has brought us many tools for designing layouts, including QuarkXpress and Adobe InDesign among the better known. Whether you're producing a button or a pamphlet or a bumper sticker, you need an effective way to lay out the design and blend your text with your images and other brand assets. So, despite the many options for distributing your message electronically, printed collateral isn't going away anytime soon.

Considering the needs of your audience is critical to anyone with a message to convey, and in a world crowded with so many distractions competing to receive your readers' attention, you have an obligation to meet them more than halfway if you expect your message to be heard. Just because I may prefer a digital experience for consuming information, it doesn't mean everyone I interact with shares that preference.

There's another part of the equation, too. While you could argue that some of these items could be made obsolete by their digital equivalents, they haven't been, and digitizing them myself is more work than the payoff would justify. I see posters from events, and even a piece of origami. I see calendars and brochures and instruction guides. Sure, almost all of my communications are electronic these days, and my scanner makes quick work of almost everything that comes to me in a dead tree format.īut as I look around my home office and wonder why there are still stacks of paper here and there, I realize there are some things that just make more sense in physical form, at least for part of their existence.

The paperless utopia I imagined I would be living in by now remains a work in progress. As I've thought more about why, I've decided it's the long tail of paper that's holding me back.

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