As SE10 team member Mark Koenig cheerfully puts it, if there is a design project, he better be able to do it, as he is the firm’s sole graphic designer. Despite being to only go-to for design, he doesn’t feel any pressure. In fact, he enjoys every minute of every deadline-marked request. Mark’s principal responsibilities include designing the layout for a quarterly client magazine and all press releases issued by SE10. Additional tasks range from creating layouts for client and company newsletters to designing advertisements as client ad campaigns arise.
The layout for the quarterly magazine, which Mark designs using Adobe InDesign, can take Mark about two eight-hour work days to complete, whereas he spends about one hour on each press release. SE10 used to create press releases in Microsoft Word, disseminating them via email as attached Word documents. In early 2011, SE10 decided to change the way in which it formatted press releases. Rather than design the press release in a Word document, SE10 switched to customized email templates. Mark describes these newly formatted press releases as “mini-websites”: The press releases are in the bodies of the email and contain the press release text, images and clickable download buttons for the Word document version of the press release as well as high-resolution versions of the images.
To properly format the press releases and design the customized templates, Mark has to have a good understanding of HTML code. Whenever another SE10 team member writes and sends a new press release his way, Mark reformats the text—using HTML code—so it fits appropriately in the email template.
The rationale behind the new format, Mark explains, is that it allows SE10 and its clients to track the percentage of people who open the press release, read it and/or download it, and even if the press release ended up in the target recipient’s SPAM. With the old format, there was no way of determining whether the target recipients opened or even received the press releases. Now, SE10 and its clients have a better understanding of the response their press releases receive.
Another benefit of the new press release format has to do with size, Mark said. The emails delivering press releases as attached Word documents would often take up 3 MB in the recipient’s inbox and thus took significantly longer to open. In contrast, the emails delivering the new format of press releases are about 30 KB: one percent the size of the old format!
