Ballona Creek Wetlands......(all plastic, no paper)

This past Spring my 6th grader was working frantically to complete "community service" hours to satisfy a requirement for his school. A small charter school with great test scores - it has a really strong emphasis on learning to be aware of the community. We have to complete 12 hours of community service each year and my wife usually sets up activities that "qualify" and my son and I head off on Saturdays. We have cleaned up woodlands, planted trees and on one very memorable occasion - we worked prepping fruit trees to be given away in downtown LA to families that had applied to a special program. I now know exactly how a pear tree should be pruned back to have the best chance of growing when replanted! Who says school is not fun?

On an outing in June we found ourselves at the Ballona Wetlands and worked a 4 hour shift pulling trash out of the waterways and filling 55 gallon trash bags. In 4 hours we filled 2 bags and it was very hard work. The interesting thing that I realized after the first hour was that everything we were pulling out of the water - was plastic - no paper!

Despite the fact that we print with responsibly managed forests (FSC and SFI certified) it has been a tough couple years for a life long printer. I still get emails from people with little "signatures" that say "please don't print this email unless necessary" or something to that effect.

So....it was all plastic! I can't imagine that there was zero paper trash thrown out - but certainly it seemed to have just disappeared! Logically - most newspaper and paper will just fall apart very quickly with moisture and turn to mulch.  But plastic? Not at all. That day at least it seemed like candy bar wrappers, plastic bags and bottles last forever!

In August 2011 the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously that cities have the right to ban the use of single-use plastic bags without conducting and environmental impact report (EIR) first. A lawsuit against Manhattan Beach claimed that the city should have conducted an EIR prior to banning plastic bags in 2008.  As part of the decision the court admitted that there was some environmental issues with paper (of course) but went on to say that "no evidence suggests that paper bags use by Manhattan Beach consumers in the wake of the plastic bag ban would contribute to those impacts in a significant way"

While convenient - plastic is bad on many levels and paper has this really nice amazing quality of breaking down easily in the environment. This was something I understood but filling those trash bags really drove home the reality.  It did make me feel pretty good about being a printer and for those of you that design printed materials - it should make you feel pretty good too!

-Sean

http://deltagraphics.com/

the right way to do customer surveys....

OK - so are we all getting peppered by surveys? The simple fact that you can do an email blast or auto blast anyone that places an order does NOT make this a good idea!  I recently had a bad experience with a tech help desk trying to configure a new router and sure enough....each call generated an automatic email "survey" to find out how they did. So 3 hours into it my email inbox is piling up with surveys and the router is still not working right!

I get that everybody wants feedback. If you are running a business or managing a department - you WANT to know if you have happy customers. You want to know if something can be improved.  I want to have happy customers too...... but the sense of urgency associated with getting that extra email or worse yet...a telephone call - really ruins any good will that hope you have with your customer.

In a decision that is old school - we printed up simple "how did we do" postcards and include them with every order. It is a photo I took in Monterey of the ocean facing the famous Aquarium. People seem to like them. Most get tossed but nobody feels badly about ignoring them. Then we will get someone so happy (or unhappy) that they have to share. We love it - especially the unhappy ones since it is a rare chance to fix something broken. Some of our best changes have come from people commenting on something they really liked or something that went wrong.

-Sean

Understanding QR Codes in 2 minutes

"We do QR codes!"

Your vendor may say that but do you they really understand the technology? It seems that everybody (including us) has QR code capability these days. It helps to understand a bit more about what is actually possible with QR codes so that you can decide the best use for your project. Very simply QR codes are written to an open ISO standard that is not proprietary technology. Anyone can write apps that "play nicely" and  that are compliant to the standard. The result: many many companies are doing cool things with QR codes. You SHOULD know what is out there. This blog is an attempt to distill things down for a quick 2 minute read.

Very simply - a small app (there are many!) is used to generate the code. It can be any color as long as the scanner (usually a cel phone camera) can see it against the background. Mostly commonly they are in black although we are seeing more and more codes done in color and with corporate logos embedded in the code to dress it up a bit. The code mostly commonly will contain a URL that a company wants to promote. This works well when you have purpose built a mobile website that it nice to read in your smart phone. A great use of this technology I saw last week was a real estate agency that built a little mobile site that will let you key in what you are looking for and it will show you houses in the area that are for sale etc.

They sky is the limit - since the function is so simple - you can really do almost anything. We have also seen QR codes that take you directly to the Apple app store to purchase a down loadable application - no more searching!

We have partnered with a firm that makes a QR code generator that includes a special "redirect" that allows your promotion to be measured and tracked. This is all something that a large company with a go-to IT department could do on their own but for the small business owner - this tool can deliver very sophisticated metrics quickly and easily.

For those with more than 2 minutes....here is a great article in Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code/

Sean
http://deltagraphics.com/

Award & Kudos

I own a printing company in Los Angeles and having a website (vs traditional print sales) has changed our business in many subtle ways. Probably the oddest thing is having clients that I have never met. I make it a point to call up all my new client at least on their first order but our customers are all over the country and the personal connection can be missing - something that we always took for granted in our regular business. Because of that getting new "web" clients often faces a huge hurdle - convincing them that you are for real, that you aren't going to vanish in 3 months and that are good at what you do. To that end we started looking around for various awards and kudos we have accrued over the years and it was surprising! Here is the result. Wow - something we had never really thought much about really looks kind of amazing when pulled all together. That said, just because somebody else liked us once upon a time......really won't matter if we can't make you happy with your job.

-Sean