According to an eConsultancy study of 1,400 U.S. consumers, 42% said they prefer to receive ads for sales and specials via e-mail compared to just 3% who said the same for social-networking sites and 1% who preferred Twitter.

I was shocked at first, until I thought about my own online habits. I’ve clicked maybe 5 ads since I started using FaceBook heavily 2 years ago. On Twitter, the only advertisements I ever click are for cutting-edge web sites. I’m not going to be on the lookout for a great deal on a new barbecue. I contrast that with my personal account with Yahoo (which folks I trust to keep SPAM in the junk folder where it belongs). In email, I get to decide when I receive the information.

Looking through the newsletters I subscribe to, they uniformly give me a great deal (usually one that makes me think, ‘how can they afford to do that?’) and/or keep me up to date with the very latest professional information. Another species email I enjoy is from designers or companies doing work that excites me.

Only those companies that have successfully earned my trust by delivering me more value than value proposition will earn a check in the opt-in box on their subscription form.

For one of the partners of Quoin, this was a dream job. He had always wanted to bring stronger graphic design to the brochures you see in social welfare offices and other non-profit locations.

The YWCA of Clark County approached us for a wide-ranging rebranding effort. Part of that was graphic design for their brochure system. These pieces are the front line for this non-profit in fulfilling their mission to help individuals in crisis. The system had suffered a range of variations due to organizational changes over the years. The result was an incoherent look that was messy and disorganized.

Drawing elements from our recent redesign of ywca’s brand, we created an energetic layout that prioritizes easy comprehension. We find that getting the best result in non-profit graphic design means that we must remain flexible as each stakeholder brings their input to the table, while we advocate for our own design viewpoint and build consensus.

Once the designs were complete, we guided the brochure through the printing process.

Portland Medical Imaging came to Quoin with a need for a big face-lift of their existing site. Their focus on comfort and compassion for their patients wasn’t being reflected in their current site. Because Quoin focuses its medical web design on the people medicine heals, we gave them a warm and inviting look that was focused on people, not medical machinery. To serve them, we also built a secure jobs listing area with an online application. We embedded a welcome video into the home page, and showcased testimonials from their enthusiastic patients.
This site was built in ColdFusion.

Launch PortlandMedicalImaging.com

The YWCA of Clark County approached us for a wide-ranging rebranding effort. Part of that was to redesign their brochure system. These pieces are the front line for this non-profit in fulfilling their mission to help individuals in crisis. We were given the mission of working within their existing corporate identity.

YWCA brochure system before redesign

As you can see from the ‘before’ image, the system had suffered a range of variations due to organizational changes over the years. The result was an incoherent look that seemed messy and disorganized. We also energized the layout while prioritizing easy comprehension.

We did take one liberty with the identity: YWCA wanted to move away from the over-bright persimmon orange shown in the ‘before’ pictures, so we chose something with more red and complexity which was in the same family of color.

We worked hand in hand with YWCA’s content writer, Eve Connell, to conceive content that spoke directly to the individual in accessible, active language.

Working with an organization such as this means that we had to remain flexible as each stakeholder brought their input to the table, while we advocated for our own design viewpoint and built consensus.

Once the designs were complete, we guided the brochures through the printing process.

Redesigned brochures have better impact.

Minimalist+ needed to communicate the concepts of energy-efficiency, comfort and simple beauty that underpin their out-of-the-box home designs. We created a brochure design that employed a clean feeling of modernism, while the colors and dynamic composition pull the reader in and give them an immersive experience.

MinimalistPlus is a start-up green builder with revolutionary ideas about how quality building gets done. The founder is Jeff Lightfoot, who has 30+ years of experience in construction and remodeling. Michelle Jeresek, the designer, had two homes in the 2010 Build It Green! home tour and one in the 2010 Street of Dreams tour, all three built with sustainability as a primary goal.
Quoin was brought in to jump-start their marketing materials. We hired a fantastic writer (Todd Schwarz http://amalgamatedschwartz.com) who crafted pitch-perfect copy. Then we expanded on the identity we’d already begun with this brochure.

We also created a brochure, which you can see here.

This is a great idea, as long as the clearinghouses are ethical about only blacklisting genuine spammers. Unfortunately, Quoin has recently had a run-in with another kind of company.

One of our clients had their email rejected by the recipient’s web host. It was an important message to a supplier. This happened several times, so the supplier talked with their host. The host said our server had been blacklisted. I checked and found that it was on a single black list, UCEPROTECT. I emailed my web host, and they sent me this reply:

Hello,
While the server is listed at UCEPROTECT, there is very little we as a company can do.  They run their blacklists only as an effort to make money.  We’ve tried to work with them before and it all comes down to them wanting money to do something that is automated in the first place.  We have repeatedly asked them for logs/evidence/proof and they adamantly do not provide any.  Unfortunately, even paying them to remove the listing gives them no reason to not re-list the server at their whim, based on little or no evidence, based on past experiences where they have done just that. Armed with this information, upper management refuses to deal with such unscrupulous companies.

Essentially, this black list holds email hostage. We did some research on UCEPROTECT, and discovered that they want 50 Euros ($70) to de-list a single IP address.

What we couldn’t understand is why reputable web hosts would be working with a black list like this. We’re very glad ours doesn’t! Web host administrators have the option to exclude lists such as UCEPROTECT but sometimes don’t take the steps necessary to exclude them.

We’ve posted this in an effort to increase the exposure of this practice. If it’s not illegal yet, why isn’t it?

ywca clark county asked Quoin to create a save-the-date card, invitation, poster and program for their new Fall fundraiser event. Working from the central concept of the chandelier that they had found, Quoin adapted their new identity system to brand the event. We placed the chandelier in the context of the red carpet, to further the combination of ‘gothic’ and ‘glam’, creepy and fabulous. (Fittingly, one of their sponsors put on a recreation of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ routine.)

Quoin guided each piece through production to ensure that color did not vary as weeks or months passed between the printing of each piece.