Mike Coyle’s Weblog

We recently published our Fall 2006 Brochure. This document, available in PDF format, highlights our product and service offerings.

Here’s a short glimpse into the “Making Of” the brochure, for those of you that like that kind of thing:

As you know, our schtick is helping small teams solve large problems. So with the help of an ancient Greek, a copy of Photoshop CS2, and a few cans of Red Bull, here’s what I came up with for the first page:

The text on that page is the first half of what will probably get morphed into our “Small Team Manifesto” or “Ode to Small Teams”, or something of the like. The punchline, so to speak, is on the last page of the brochure.

The image started out as an old woodcarving of Archimedes, the famous Greek mathemetician credited with the quote:

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

However, our mission is not to help old Greek guys solve problems by themselves. This is where Photoshop came in. The image now has a small team (i.e. Archimedes and his oft-overlooked twin brother Floyd) moving the earth with said lever.

A couple of other production notes:

• The document was produced with Apple’s Pages. I’ve owned Pages (versions 1 and 2) since it came out, but hadn’t spent any significant time using it prior to creating the brochure. It was a pleasure to work with.
• Oddly enough, Pages doesn’t ship with a landscape-oriented templates but it was really easy to set up. I built the brochure as a landscape-oriented document so that it is easier to read on a laptop screen. Kudos to Seth Godin for that tip.
• Pages plays very nicely with Adobe Illustrator, at least in my experience. This made it trivial to move our vector-based graphics into Pages.
• Even though some of the brochure content is repurposed from the Botonomy.com and ProjectPipe.com websites, some material also flowed back the other way, thanks to the creative jolt that comes with working under a different set of constraints. Specifically, many of the graphics on the latest ProjectPipe home page were initially developed for the brochure, and then repurposed for the web.

Over the years, I have developed a bit of apprehension when it comes to using WYSIWYG tools, since many visual layout tools (at least in GUI design and HTML) are a “pay me now or pay me later” proposition where you trade instant gratification for maintenance complexity downstream. That being said, it was really nice to drag stuff around in Pages, and have the layout “just work” when it came time to ship.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Botonomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.