Most people think that design costs money. Some even believe that it’s a waste of money. I’d like to tell you how good design along with industry experience actually saved our client thousands of dollars.

Recently, a client of APM approached us to handle a large print and mailing job – usually a fairly straightforward matter. Our client had produced all files and we had sourced trusted suppliers to handle the printing and fulfilment. After receiving the print-ready PDF’s we ran through all the normal checks and concluded that the weight of each pack would be about 10 grams over the 125g postal weight band.

As there are 28,300 shareholders, the postage charge alone on this job would add up to $51,750!

One thing that few clients realise is that a properly typeset document can be much shorter in length than the equivalent Word file! Wise font selection and formatting, use of columns, page margins and a host of other design tricks mean that the length of a document can be reduced by as much as 30%! We suggested to our client that by re-designing and re-setting their existing document would could bring the page count down to 28 pages which, as well as costing $2,000 less in print, would reduce their postage charge by $18,500. They were more than happy for us to go ahead.

So next time you think design is a waste of money, think again!