Self Promotion that Serves the Client

By: Susan E. Davis |  7/1996

Greenfield/Belser Ltd proves the best way to promote a firm’s capability is by giving clients what they need.

Greenfield/Belser Ltd brought science and art to their latest capability brochure “Finding and Choosing Lawyers.” In the 36-page booklet, the Washington, D.C., design firm delivered carefully researched data about how to attract business to their specially targeted legal clientele.

Targeting clients is Greenfield/Belser’s forte. When the Supreme Court issued the Bates Decision in 1978 giving lawyers the right to advertise, lawyer Donna Greenfield told graphic designer Burkey Belser the ruling would open up a new arena of graphic design. And ever since joining forces professionally to form Greenfield/Belser in 1980, the two have capitalized on her prediction. Now with more than 100 law firms as clients, they are the undisputed rulers of their realm.

Their efforts at self-promotion took a qualitative leap forward in 1991 when they hooked up with Mark Greene, principal of Market Intelligence, a research firm also specializing in the legal profession. They collaborated on their first joint brochure, “Law Firm Marketing Guide,” with Greene’s firm investing $50,000 worth of market research and Greenfield/Belser making an equal investment in graphic design and production. Belser estimates that the effort paid for itself in the new business it generated within two months.

“It was so successful with Mark the first time around, we took another crack at it,” says Belser. “We needed it to solidify our position as experts in a very, very tough field.” So Greenfield/Belser decided to initiate another study in 1994 to find out what corporate counsel want from law firms.

Organizing the data

Greene, Belser, Greenfield, and copy director George Kell discussed what type of information they wanted to collect, after which Greene devised an extensive questionnaire in his office across the Potomac River in Catharpin, Virginia. “Doing proprietary research for law firms is a big part of our business, so we knew what questions to ask and what kinds of results of expect,” says Greene. He and Belser set a 90-day deadline for the survey and a goal of reaching 250 corporate counsel in companies grossing more than $100 million annually. The deadline prevailed—and Greene interviewed 170 corporations in the allotted 90 days, then passed on a report to Belser.

Belser studied the report thoroughly. “I lived with it,” he recalls. “It was in my pores.” He discussed it extensively with Greene, even differing with him over some conclusions, and he struggled to find the best way to organize and illustrate the statistics. “As they became clear, we decided we really had to pull the pre-sale activities apart into two separate stages, and that led us to a two-step organization—finding a lawyer and choosing one,” says Belser. “It was a funneling process. I put all the key points down and I tried to identify how I wanted those individual points to be cast in order to make a clear, logical story that carries all the way through to the end.”

Then he assembled examples of work the firm had done for its clients and matched them to the key points in the report. Finally, after much experimentation and deliberation, Belser sketched out a one-page preliminary layout for the entire brochure.

“I do everything on a single page because I want to know what the pace is,” says Belser. “There are so many different levels to doing a brochure, but the key is pacing. What I want to have happen on the cover, then the next three pages, then beyond them how I want the rest to pace in and out—it’s the same architecture as if you were designing a magazine.”

But Belser didn’t stop there. To “feel” the pacing, Belser had paper dummies made of two possible layouts. “Over the years I’ve found that I can do a linear drawing so I can see everything in place at once, but that’s not the way a brochure works,” says the designer. “It’s an aggressively linear process. You have to actually turn page after page. That’s the only way you can know what the impact of your work is. If you don’t do a paper dummy to test your judgment, you could be making a huge mistake. I’ve made them. I don’t want to make them again.”

Illustrating the data

When Belser selected the samples he wanted to showcase in the brochure, he chose work Greenfield/Belser had done for top legal firms. “I want to lead clients to better work,” he notes, “and one way to do that is to show them more exciting work among firms they know. And then they’ll think, ‘Maybe we could do something like that, too.’” Then he worked closely with photographer John Burwell to create the setup shots of the samples.

“I lay out the illustrations and select the props, and then I tell John how I’d like each setup lit, and we work together on the lighting,” says Belser. The two often used bottles to create dramatic lighting effects, “maybe a dozen bottles with light shining through them, casting shadows here and there all around the table,” the designer explains. “Each one of the setups takes about 2 1/2 hours to assemble.” And judging from the response, the time was well spent. “I got as many calls asking how I took the pictures as I did about the information itself.”

In addition to the four-color photos, Belser decided to highlight the text with whimsical pen and-ink drawings. But before putting pen to paper, he studied the linework of illustrators Georg Grosz, Ralph Steadman, and Saul Steinberg.

“Saul Steinberg is someone whose work I love,” comments the designer, “He is the most intelligent man ever to have put pen to paper. This guy scares me he’s so good. I take such delight in his work. That’s what I was trying to get in these images.”

Belser reworked each illustration many times over, striving for a more exciting, more nuanced line. “The hardest point for me is to squeeze out the style,” says the designer, who started out as an illustrator, but switched to graphic design “because I couldn’t stand what other designers were doing with my illustrations.” He was never able to create any one image that met his ideals. “I love to draw, but I’ll tell you that drawing is very painful,” he admits. “All I see in each drawing are the lines that aren’t right.” To create the final illustrations, he cut and pasted various parts of the different drawings, taking a face but not a hand from one drawing and eyes and nose but not the lips from another.

“To create eight illustrations that didn’t slip into true corn and that were connected to the text was a most challenging and difficult thing to do,” notes Belser. “We got a a lot of comments from lawyers that they could never do anything that humorous in their brochures. But that’s ridiculous. Of course, they can. We’re edging closer to it.”

Enriching the texture

To enhance the visual appeal of the text pages, Belser decided to run the headlines and key sentences in red (PMS 199), along with selected parts of the line drawings. The rest of the text and art were printed in green (PMS 560). “I was afraid the red wouldn’t rise to the same level of interest if it was printed flat,” says the designer. “It needed a kick, and I knew I could get it with thermography. Sure, it’s a printing technique with a bad reputation—the poor man’s engraving—but to use it in some really refreshing, creative way was very challenging.”

Belser chose the green to relate to Greenfield. “It’s too easy to pass up if you find the right green,” he says. “I chose the red because I’m a very bold, aggressive person. The danger, which has never come up in this piece, is that it’s a Christmas book. But neither the green nor the red is big and thick right next to one another. If you print those colors on a white sheet, it’s Christmas.”

When he selected the stock, Belser specified Confetti by Fox River in a variety of weights and colors: a green 80-lb. Cover weight for the text apges, and a red 80-lb. cover weight for the two divider pages. Then he chose a coated 80-lb. white cover stock, Gleneagle Gloss by UK, for the photographs.

“I want each brochure to be like a baked Alaska—the most wonderful dessert you just have to have,” Belser says, explaining why he selected the different papers. And he was equally eclectic in his printing specs. In addition to the flat-in-and-thermography combination on the text apges, he used white ink and red foil stamping on the cover. For the photography pages, he printed a four-color photo on one side of the sheet and two coats of red plus a varnish on the reverse side.

Belser used Bodoni for the headline type and Futura for the text because they are the firm’s corporate fonts (along with Firmin Didot in the Greenfield/Belser logo). “Bodoni, of course, has no place as a text font, but it’s a supremely elegant letterform for headlines,” notes Belser. “I always agonize over using Futura because I don’t think it is a wonderfully readable face, but it does have a boatload of personality for a sans serif type,and it’s not Helvetica. It harks back to the 30s, which was a time of intellectual fluorescence, and I’m fond of it. Then we added a ton of leading to the text so the research would not feel overwhelming to the reader.”

Customed presentation

Spiral binding adds another dimension of texture to the brochure. “I could not put this piece together any other way,” Belser says. “Since I’m dealing with single sheets, it’s instrumental to the design itself.” And because he used a do-it-yourself wire binding system, his staff can assemble customized brochures, targeted to specific clients. “I can take pages from the first brochure and produce a capability brochure for Greenfield/Belser, or I can have a corporate piece that features the work of one or two law firms.”

When introduced at a trade show of the National Law Firm Marketing Association in 1994, the brochure made just the kind of dramatic splash there and in the legal media that Greenfield/Belser sought. Then Belser and mark Greene took the brochure on the road, giving slide lectures to association chapters in Baltimore, Chicago, Nashville, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. “The brochure helps people understand our level of expertise in the industry, it give them something useful from us, and it gives us something to talk about with them,” notes Greene.

“I can absolutely say that the brochures are responsible for tons of business,” says Belser, who is hard at work on a third in the series. “In fact, it’s a model of how to promote. Now that we’re extremely well known in the field and have established a lead, it’s my goal to maintain it. As all good things that work for clients and that are ultimately successful, it came directly out of our work.”