Altered reality and the seven-page PDF

Get set to be liberated, creatively

If you’re a creative pro, then our mention, in the headline, of a “seven-page PDF,” must make you cringe at some deep, subliminal level. 

A seven-page PDF? What? Are you crazy? 

Allow us to tell you a little story. You’ll like this one. 

Is it Escher, or is it advertising?

We recently wrote a big case study for a client, and their gifted internal graphics team was laying it out. But there was a problem: There wasn’t enough copy for an eight-page piece. And so the designer left a big hole in it: “PLEASE FILL THIS PAGE.”

Before we turn to how we went about filling it, let’s back up here a tad. We’ve been tossing a lot of assumptions your way so far, and now we’d like to expose them:

• We live in a 3-D world. 
• Printed pieces are 3-D. 
• Paper has two sides. 

(Following this so far? It’s not hard.)

• If you fold a piece of paper in two, it effectively has four sides. Four pages.  
• This is the basis for the carved-in-stone rule, since the days of Gutenberg, that the page-count for any printed piece must be a multiple of four. 

You know this. You toil in it daily. A printed piece is four pages. Or eight pages. Or 12 pages. Or maybe 16, 24, or 32 pages. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. 

And it’s a rule that's inviolable. We’re not living in some Escher distorted-reality world. You can’t remove, or add, a side to a piece of paper. 

Crisis equals massive opportunity

We confess that, when that designer tossed us the “PLEASE FILL THIS PAGE” page, we knee-jerk reacted to fill it. A piece has to be eight pages, right? 

So we, and the client, worked hard to come up with new material to put there. 

But there was a problem. Try as we may, nothing worked. It all felt forced. It broke up the flow. It diluted the call-to-action or CTA.

It took us a while to realize that we were victims of our own orthodoxy. And more importantly, a seismic global event had handed us the opportunity of a lifetime. 

We’re talking Covid-19, people. 

Everyone—especially the intended target audience of this piece—was working remotely from home. So why mail it? We didn’t have all those addresses. And so it logically follows...

• If you’re not going to mail it, why print it?  

And then, it’s not a big leap to: 

• If you’re not going to print it, why be a slave to the multiple-of-four rule?

Voilà. A seven-page PDF. 

It tells the story. It wastes no space. It got killer results.

More boxes to think outside of

You don’t need a pandemic to be creative. (Boy, is that a bizarre sentence!) But you get our point. We had a client that wanted to make a costly printed piece with easel-back wings, die-cut, on it. But we realized that most of the recipients... have kids. So why not make it into a “free” PDF, with cut-and-fold lines that would be fun to assemble, while building a bond between parent and child—and reinforcing our client’s branding the whole time? 

It’s that kind of thinking you need to embrace. 

By the way, our other client now does seven-page PDFs all the time. Along with five-pagers, three-pagers, you name it. Boy is it liberating! Everyone benefits except the printer and the post office. 

Have a creative challenge that requires outside-the-box thinking? Contact us today. We’d love to help.