Designer-printer finds her niche

Every day after school or work, Lisa Nelson would come home, turn on her computer and spend some time playing around with page design and layout.

Eventually it dawned on her that she didn't enjoy work — she was working as a pharmacy technician at LDS hospital — and she did enjoy fiddling around with a computer. Enough people had asked her for help with designing various newsletters, fliers, business cards and the like that she could maybe strike out on her own and try designing for a living. She opened a printing company out of her home in 2002, naming it Custom Impressions.

However, Nelson said the vision she had of Custom Impressions and the direction it has taken aren't exactly in line.

"It isn't what I thought initially," she said.

It turned out that the designing niche had already been filled for the most part, so Nelson steered her fledgling business toward small quantity printing instead.

"I'm kind of like a Kinko's," she said.

It can be hard to find someone who will print just 100 business cards or 25 flyers, Nelson said. That's where she comes in. Using an assortment of equipment — an inkjet printer, a laser printer, binding equipment — accumulated since starting up Custom Impressions, she is willing to take on these smaller jobs. That means she mostly works with other small businesses, often contacts made through her connection with the Murray Chamber of Commerce, which Nelson joined after moving to Murray shortly after opening Custom Impressions.

She is quick to point out she is not an artist and doesn't hand-draw anything.

"My Pictionary is stick figures," she said.

What she does, if customers want it, she said, is lay out the different elements of a business card or a flyer on a page so that it is readable and looks good. Her role is different for each customer. Some people know exactly what they want, and she merely does their printing. Others only have a vague idea and use her to do all the design work as well as printing.

She said she compiled a cookbook for one of her customers, finding art and doing the layout and binding on the book. There is a definite satisfaction in taking a project like that from start to finish, she said.

In recent months Nelson said she has done a lot of postcard designs — a company will contact her, wanting to send out a coupon, and she finds images that fit the theme they want and then tweaks the design of the postcard. She has also started branching out to photography, although she hasn't marketed that aspect of Custom Impressions very much, wanting to keep her nights and weekends free. She said she has done a few family photos and even a graduation photo.

Mostly, she takes pictures for the Murray Chamber of Commerce of events like ribbon cuttings. Those generally happen during the day, allowing her to keep those nights and weekends for herself.

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E-mail: dmaxfield@desnews.com