Bookmarks: Valentine's Day and Olympics

Valentine's Day bookmarks: We also photocopied this bookmark design onto pale pink cardboard, but they were all shy of the camera...  One set of words, but a different font for each of the eight per sheet on one side, with a piece of prose I wrote last year; and the cheerful 'your library' ditty on the back of each one.

One side of the Olympics bookmarks features a quote from Pierre de Coubertin.

The other side features the Olympic motto, in Latin and in English, because I dunno about you, but even if I could guess Fortius as being about strength, I'm not confident that I'd have guessed Citius as faster...

The little box with the library credit burgles a slogan/vision statement a teacher librarian pal uses all the time at her school.

Learn...to do your best.

She didn't mind my borrowing it.  I adapted it to be the library-promo piece.

You'll notice that, for these, the design is the same on each bookmark and I've done the variety thing with relevant colours of cardboard.  Easy.

We hand out a bookmark to each borrower when they borrow.  I've blogged about them before, why as well as other designs I've created (check out the 'bookmarks' tag from the tag cloud over on the right).  The short version is less about Keeping Books Noice and more about a moment of helpful generosity to each borrower, something useful; and a piece of informative advertising to remind them of this library each time they use it.

A year or more after we started doing the bookmark thing, the borrowers expect it; a few sweet crazy kids collect an example of each new design... and they haven't cost us a bomb in either software or cardboard.  Every school has a program like Microsoft Publisher.  Every school has coloured cardboard... it's not hard to design your own...

The Olympic bookmarks are generic you may notice; nothing about the specific/current games, which means I can use them again.  Same thing applies to other themes; many can be annually revisited, rather than designing new each time.  Sure, I'll probably tweak, but it's also good when your're busy-AS to fish out last year's bookmark design for this theme and just print up bookmarks.

I've seen some beautiful bookmarks in other libraries, colour printed and so forth; because we hand these out with every loan, we go through rather a lot, which is why most of ours are like the ones above, theme-related and photocopied onto coloured cardboard.  Inexpensive, but not ineffective.

Cheers

Ruth