Whenever traveling far from home, there are two rituals I follow on the way home.
I always buy a magnet from where I visited to put on my fridge.
And I send out a couple of postcards to family or friends.
Last week, before I started heading back to the airport from PRINTING United, I double checked that I had the cards ready to go. Disney and palm trees for my dad and sister, and a few cool embellished postcards by Konica Minolta on Sappi paper for some marketers who couldn’t make it to the expo this year.
A small stack of mail awaited me on the coffee table when I got back, the usual mix of bills, appeals, magazines, and circulars. But standing out to me was a “PENNSYLVANIA VOTES” postcard with a vintage look. You probably know what I’m talking about: retro big block type and images from places of interest inside the letters.
On the address side, a live postcard stamp. The message, from a political campaign, reminds people to vote in next week’s elections. Nothing too different there. But the handwriting tactic, while it’s not also not new, hit me in a new way after my trip.
Whether it’s by robots or actual human beings employed by a service, handwriting stands out in the mailbox. It cuts through the clutter in digital channels that are saturated with election messages even in an off-year because it’s ink on paper. It’s imperfect, uneven, maybe smudged here or there, but it feels simple and sincere.
Read the rest of this story on Printing Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
