DOCUMENT Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 30) P D PRODUCTION & DELIVERY & c ertainly, this is not the first you have heard about the color craze. However, as you explore your color options, know that all applications were not created equal. Find out which palette will help you paint the right picture within your documents to garner the desired response. o Color Your World and the color elements, such as a corporate logo, are pre-printed on white paper stock using an offset press. Offset presses run at high speeds but lack the ability to print variable images. However, offset presses print cleanly on a wide range of papers and allow organizations to present their brands to their customers. For variable data, many organizations select highlight color, since the process is cheaper and easier to manage than full color. By using a single color to highlight important items, such as the total due on a bill or key marketing messages, organizations achieve the recognition and retention benefits of color without costly full color graphics. Organizations combine offset-printed static images with highlightcolor variable data to meet 100% of their requirements and act as entry points into digital color. Other organizations choose full digital color to communicate with the full impact of color. Although digital color presses do not have the same range of colors as offset presses and cannot produce the very high quality required for some documents, such as magazines and photographs, organizations can replicate pre-printed branding and create full color documents with variable data in a single pass. With digital color presses, organizations present data-driven graphics, complex charts and color images. Customers find the color graphics easier to read and understand and digital images provide memorable references or reminders. New full-color digital presses using inkjet technologies have reduced the cost of digital color to compete with highlight color. Operating just a few pennies per page above the production costs for monochrome print, these high-speed presses enable organizations to jump into digital color for a cheaper investment than ever before. Introducing effective color production to your transactional documents | By Richard Huff Organizations use color in their transactional documents to communicate more effectively with customers. In fact, research has shown that adding color to transactional documents, including invoices and bills, provides 73% better comprehension and 30% faster payments than with traditional black-on-white documents. In addition, organizations also use color print to highlight any marketing messages or key metrics that may strengthen the relationship with a customer. By adding promotional content to transactional documents, such as bills and financial statements, companies have a better chance of getting their messages to the recipient than those sending separate promotional documents or those that include additional promotional materials, such as inserts, into the envelope with the transactional document. TransPromo documents serve multiple functions by conveying financial information, such as stock trades, bank transactions or utility usage, and promoting additional products and services based on a transaction or series of transactions. Such TransPromo documents take advantage of specific customer information, based on a given customer’s transaction activities or participation in programs, to offer related products or services to that customer. Although not required for TransPromo documents, color provides a key component to the promotional message. With the availability of software to create personalized color documents and new printing systems that produce color pages at lower costs than in previous years, organizations see additional benefits to color printing, outweighing any increases in operating costs. Which Color Is Right for You? Color printing continues to evolve, and vendors offer more choices than ever before to help organizations in getting their color wheels turning. Organizations have two color options: highlight color and full digital color. Most enterprises already use color in their documents, 30 document june.08 www.DOCUMENTmedia.com The Modern Palette Document composition software combines variable data into a static layout or changes the layout based on the data provided for each http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com
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