Creating a Sell Sheet for Your Invention

[StephenKey]

Creating a Sell Sheet for Your Invention

by StephenKey » Mon Jun 13, 2011 9:56 am

StephenKey

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This is such a great article we thought we would repost it here. I just read a great article in the Wall Street Journal about One Hit Wonders. Don't miss it as well.


A guest post by Tara Roskell, an InventRight Student, freelance designer and also writer of http://www.ideasuploaded.com, a blog about inventing, including interviews with successful inventors.

A sell sheet is a presentation sheet very similar to an advert, it is there to sell your invention idea to a prospective licensee (company who wants to rent your idea). A sell sheet will contain images if your invention along with a title and bullet points which sell its benefits.

1. DECIDE ON THE CONTENT

First things first, grab a sketch pad or some plain paper and decide what needs to go on your invention sell sheet. Let’s say in this example the sell sheet is for a new type of dog dog collar with integral solar powered lights.

You will need:

Big selling headline
Several bullet points of the benefits
Large picture of dog wearing collar
Inset picture of key feature of collar
Your contact details copyright, patent pending etc
2. SKETCH OUT YOUR LAYOUT IN MINIATURE

When they are working on a layout, designers will often create small sketches less than 10 cm high. For some reason working at this small size makes it easier to see if your layout will balance or not. Draw yourself a small rectangle to represent your sell sheet and start marking in the elements of contents you worked out in the list above. Don’t worry about the quality of the drawing, no one else will see it. If you are having trouble working out what looks right, grab a few magazines and flick through to the adverts. Copy the layouts – where do they position the images and the main text, do the same with your sell sheet.

3. CREATING THE PICTURES FOR YOUR SELL SHEET

By this stage you will have worked out what images you need to show off your idea. Photoshop is a great piece of software used by designers for manipulating photos, but it’s expensive, so use whatever you have, or download a free piece of software called Gimp

There are different options for how to create the pictures of your invention:

a. Create a prototype/mock up and take photos of it

For example for the dog collar idea we mentioned before maybe you could buy an existing dog collar with lights and then take apart a solar powered light and stick the bit that absorbs the light on the collar. You could then take a photo of a dog wearing your collar mock up.

b. Find an existing photograph and adapt it

There are lots of sites with good quality photographs that you can buy for just a few dollars (or even some for free). My personal favourite is 123rf.com, but also see dreamstime.com fotolia.com istockphoto.com or morgue file.com (free pics).

c. Find some reference material to create a drawing

Look on goggle images or one of the photo libraries mentioned above and use these a reference to draw or trace images to create a representation of your idea. You can either draw by hand and scan the images in or ideally draw your image on the computer with software such as Photoshop (free alternative Gimp) or Illustrator (free alternative Inkscape)

d. 3D for more advanced users

If you want to get more advanced you could also look into using 3d software, but this has a steep learning curve. I personally use Strata 3d (pc and mac) and Cheetah 3d (mac only). For free 3d software there is a program called Blender 3d, which I have tried, but found very hard to use.

4. CREATING YOUR SELL SHEET LAYOUT

Using your small sketch (and reference adverts) as a guide you, now have everything you need to start putting your sell sheet together. Using page layout software, type in your headline, bullet points and contact info and place your images on the page. If you don’t have any decent page layout software there are a couple of free options Scribus and
Inkscape

If in doubt keep things simple, use a largish bold typeface for your heading, it’s usually best to avoid scripty or cartoony typefaces. Stick to one or two typefaces at the most, and just use a different weight or size typeface for your bullet points.

5. CREATE A PDF FROM YOUR LAYOUT

When you have finished your layout as well as saving your document so you can come back and edit it if you ever need to, most applications will have an option to save/ or export as an Acrobat PDF. The great thing about PDFs is that most people are able to open them on their computers, and you can easily attach it to an email. Make sure the PDF isn’t more than a few mb at most, you should be able to adjust the saving settings to sort this out if it is a problem.

If you would like to see some sample sell sheets click this link: http://stephenkey.com/2011/04/13/sell-sheet-samples/

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