Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Susie Ghahremani Wild Life Postcards


Post Office... Who works at a post office and can explain this to me. This is the back of a postcard. It looks nice. It has nice colors. It's for the Susie Ghahremani upcoming show at Giant Robot 2 in LA. The address is on the bottom left corner, it looks good there. Right? It's laid out in the colors of the card, brown and orange ish. It's cute. The show is coming up, but today, a bunch of cards came back. The address is on the bottom, and that's why it's messed up. For some reason, because it's on the bottom, the people or machines that be, think that it's the address for the TO: even though there's a sticker label on the right, that's clearly the TO: spot. The From: could never be on the right side, right? 

So lesson learned, lay that address out on the upper left even if it doesn't look as cool there. And even if you're telling people to go to the address on the upper left corner of the card. You can't tell them that your event is at an address that's lower on the left side. What if you hand wrote a real postcard and put your return address up in the corner, but then was relaying a new address (cuz you're moving) to the recipient on the bottom left? The card might come to your new address? 

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7 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

i used to work at the post office.. and... if i can remember... that people sort them out first before it goes to the machine... shouda put it in the upper left corner =/

8:26 PM  
Blogger edwinushiro said...

I was told that the machines scan the mail from bottom to top. And that's why you should never place numbers below the recipients zip code. Although I had some mail that seem to bypass this system. That's the million dollar question, right?

12:06 AM  
Blogger Marissa said...

hi there, i popped over here from susie's blog. this is what i told her:

i have an answer about the postcards! the machines at the post office scan letters and postcards from the bottom up, so they read the zip code first. so it's really important that the bottommost address on the card is that of the recipient, not of the sender. which is why the standard envelope setup has the sender's address in the top left. because your sender address is at the bottom, the machine reads that first and thinks "ok, send this to LA!" not much you can do at this point (unless you want to cover up the GR address, remove the scanner bars from the bottom and resend), but next time position the sender's address in the top left and you shouldn't have this problem.

hope this helps. i don't work at a post office but i did a lot of time in the mailroom during college.

9:52 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Point taken

10:31 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

wow. total bummer.

11:51 AM  
Blogger beau b said...

had the same experience with a big gallery mailing. after getting yelled at by a usps employee when i asked for restitution, i now fully understand the "going postal" expression

6:57 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm a designer and develop mailing panels often. Even so, if I ever have any questions, I forward the panel to the experts for confirmation before printing. Not only are people available to help you directly, but there is also a wealth of information regarding the design of direct mail on the USPS site.

To find a Mailpiece Design Analyst near you:
http://pe.usps.com/mpdesign/mpdfr_mda_lookup.asp

1:29 PM  

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