Learn From “Mistakes”

Since we have a project to design brochures, I am interested in posting related brochure designs. I was curious to learn about brochure designs from bad brochures. So, I searched articles related to bad brochures, and I found one. According to the article, there are several signs of a bad brochure:

1. All text, scant pictures. A bad brochure has lots of text and almost no pictures.

2. All paragraphs, no lists or subsections. One sign of a bad brochure is text content that are made of all paragraphs with no lists, no subheadings and no sub sections.

3. Wild font style, Lots of font styles. A bad brochure has a wild font style or it has lots of different font styles.

4. No pictures of people. A bad brochure has no pictures of people.

5. Too many colors. Another big sign of a bad brochure are layouts with too many colors.

6. No call to action. A call action such as “call now”, “buy now” or “join now” is important in brochures.

I think the article is still debatable, for Instance picture of people. I don’t think that all brochures must contain pictures of people. It really depends on what is the point or purpose of a brochure. If we create a brochure for informing audiences about detail product descriptions, I don’t think it is necessary to put pictures of people on the brochure.

What do you think about the signs of a bad brochure? Do you agree with those signs?

The following is an example of a brochure.



What do you think about the brochure? What wrong with it?

Hopefully by knowing signs of a bad brochure, we can avoid them in order to create a good brochure.

Tips for Creating Digital Resumes

In the beginning of the semester, we learned a little bit about how to create a visual resume. I recently found an article from Mashable, 9 Dynamic Digital Resumes, that gives four great tips for creating a visual resume:

1. Give the reader your history
2. Aesthetics matter
3. Make it personal
4. Use graphics to inform

Do you agree with these principles? Did you use them in your visual resume?

Mashable also posted an article about creating impressive video resumes. It states that in order for a video resume to be successful, you should use the following guidelines:

1. Make sure it's appropriate
2. Don't just read out your resume
3. Keep it short
4. Don't be afraid to be creative
5. Make sure it passes the share test

The article also provides some great examples of video resumes. Have you ever created a video resume? What principles from our Visual Literacy class do you think apply to video resumes?