Klassen Communications Blog

A couple of months ago, I was reading a note by InDesign guru David Blatner. He was raving about a portable, dual-sided sheetfed scanner he was using.

While I have a single-sided flatbed scanner, it’s a pain to have to manually put things down one page at a time. Thus, I wasn’t using it that often.

So I’ve always been on the lookout for a good sheetfed option. There are tons of multi-function devices that do scanning, copying and faxing, but I didn’t care to go that route. I don’t need another bulky item for my work space.

So after the glowing review by David and the supporting glowing reviews by the folks at Amazon.com, I took a chance and bought the scanner David was talking about.

Wow! Really… Wow!

(I’ve put both the Mac and PC versions of the scanner in my Amazon Store in the Hardware category.

For someone using a huge flatbed all these years, moving to a simple sheetfed that only measures about 11 inches wide by 5 inches deep completely changed how I manage my swipe file.

First, a word on swipe files. Quoting Clayton Makepeace’s Direct Response Glossary (which you should bookmark), a swipe file is, “A collection of successful promotions, ads and sales letters you use to get ideas from.”

Every successful copywriter and designer I’ve met has a swipe file. So naturally, I started building mine long ago. (One of the shortcuts to success is to see what the successful people in your field are doing and do it, too.)

But what you find with a swipe file is that all those promotions take up space. It’s not long before you can have a file cabinet overflowing with this stuff. And if you’re a little sloppy about how you categorize the material, things get hard to find to the point where your swipe file is useless to you. You’re simply not going to use it often if you have trouble finding what you’re looking for.

Digitizing your swipe file helps to solve that. Mind you, I still keep some hard-copy material. And some of the larger size promotions are almost impossible to scan with a sheetfed.

But the majority of my swipe file is now digitized and can fit on a single DVD for backup purposes.

Now I want to go beyond telling you that I have a digital swipe file. I want to tell you exactly how I manage all the information.

1. On my hard drive, I created categories for various types of marketing material. I currently have 40 categories including obvious ones like sales letters, magalogs and envelopes to less obvious categories like tables of content, lift notes and subscription cards. I’m pretty much scanning anything that a designer might need to design because you never know what a client might need you to do.

2. With the scanner I’m using (and most scanners for that matter), the result is automatically created as a PDF, color or B/W depending on the setting you choose.

3. If there is some personal information on the material I’m scanning, like my name and address, I’ll open the PDF in Acrobat and use the Redaction function to remove it. If you don’t own Acrobat, no problem… you can use a marker to cover up the information before you scan. (Or, maybe you don’t care if the info is there.)

4. The PDF is given a file name starting with a code (like SL for sales letter) and the name of the product or company that the material is talking about. From there, it’s placed into the appropriate folder on my hard drive.

5. When I want to do a quick scan of my swipe file, I use Adobe Bridge. You can use something else but the key is that you want to use something that will show you an actual thumbnail of the material, not just the generic Adobe PDF icon. For example, if you were looking at a folder full of photographs, you’d want to see thumbnails of the actual photos, not some generic JPEG icon. By using something like Bridge, it makes it very easy for me to zero in on what I’m looking for.

And that’s basically it. By making it so easy to see categories of my swipe file at a glance, I’m much more likely to use my swipe file. And more importantly, I’m much more likely to find what I need quickly.

A side benefit to having a scanner so easy to use (it doesn’t have to “warm up” like my flatbed, so it’s ready when I’m ready) is that I digitized important articles and tutorials in all the magazines that were piling up on my shelves.

Here’s a perfect example…

I’ve been a subscriber to Photoshop User Magazine for a number of years. Each issue has great tutorials and tips. But after a few years, there’s no way you’re going to remember where a specific tutorial is if you can even remember about a tutorial you saw a couple of years ago anyway.

And, frankly, do you really need to save all the content in each magazine you get? Do you think you’ll want to re-read product reviews for things that aren’t even available any more? Unlikely.

So what I did was go through each magazine and pull out only the things worth keeping, mainly the tutorials and tips. Then, I can scan them and put them in folders on my hard-drive with descriptive file names that make it clear what the article/tutorial is about.

When you tear out only the articles worth saving long-term and compare it to what parts of the magazine you don’t really need to save, you’ll be amazed at the space you free up in your studio. I was awestruck by the pile “to be scanned” versus the pile “to be recycled.”

So that’s how I manage that aspect of my business. That scanner is one of the best purchases I’ve ever made for my business. If it broke down, I’d immediately buy a new one without giving it a second thought. If you have a swipe file that isn’t digitized, you might want to consider finding a scanner that works best for your needs, and then start scanning.