Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Katie Thomas - Brochure

UPDATE: After watching Dr. Wilcox's canvas lecture, I realized there was still tons more I could do to make the brochure more effective, like pushing the visuals up to the top of the page and utilizing some golden rectangles, chunking text with color boxes, adding more structure and editing out some of the visual clutter. Here's the latest version:





DRAFT:

Brochure - Outside


Brochure - Inside

Here's my attempt at an AHRD brochure. I've changed the logo a bit and aimed for more of a visual metaphor of building blocks. I still haven't watched Dr. Wilcox's lecture from earlier this week but I'm hoping to get more ideas on brochures from it and maybe try some different approaches too. I'm particularly trying to keep a bit of white space in my layouts and that means cutting a lot of content. For the inside of the brochure, I tried to break up the vertical spaces a bit with images and color crossing over the fold lines but I'm not sure if it works. Also, I'm hoping to have a quote or two for the "Quotes" page before the final is due. I would love to get some feedback, thanks.


5 comments:

  1. Wow, the coloring and layout really looks like a JMU brochure I've seen before! Good job on imitating a brand! I really like the building block ideas and your use of visual blocks with the titles and front page. How did you make that building/chalk-like drawing?! I would remove the boxes in front of the building because they're just floating there and they cover up the awesome of the building.

    I think the color/image bleed on the inside works, especially with columns 1 and 2 (if the viewer is only viewing one panel, the bleed alludes to more information in the next panel). But the bleed between columns 2 and 3 might not work. The title looks to be split which leads to confusion for the reader (unless that vertical line isn't the boundary of the panel, then don't listen to me). And I have a problem with that image being split where it is. If you look, the group is nearly split 50/50 male/female. So in column 2 you show the male portion of the image, and in column 3 you show the female portion of the image. You don't want to segregate sexes by having males "see yourself grow" and females "find yourself here". Maybe it's just me, but that's something I noticed.

    My only other criticism, cause I know you can take it, is that the bolded words in the titles do not read well and are not intuitively part of the titles where they need to be. I read the titles as "Build future your with" and "Find yourself in the AHRD graduate program"/"here". I would stick to Left-to-Right and Top-to-Bottom reading directions. No need to get all fancy on people.

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  2. Yeah, those lines are just decorative. All the copy is spaced evenly between the folds. The fold in the photo happens right between the two guys on the far left so there's no gender segregation, I promise! The titles with the bold were an experiment so maybe I'll make them more conventional.

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  3. Katie, once again, your color schemes look absolutely amazing!! You really have a knack for that stuff!! The pictures appear very clear too. Just a few reccomendations: First, I would spread out the words on the page titled "find youself" just a littel bit more. They run together, which makes them sort of hard to read. Also, while I love the fact that the pictures bleed out of the standard brochure format, it may not work so well when you are looking at an standard 8x11 folded brochure. Depending on what direction you are going in, you may want to put all of the items within the confines of the columns. Your cover looks amazing, and the logo fits perfectly.

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  4. I LOVE this design. So much of what I liked about the examples Dr. Wilcox gave us to look at were the spreads across the flaps. Your design is cohesive and not stuck in columns! Hooray for you!

    AWESOME drawing of Wilson Hall -how in the heck did you make that?

    I see what others are saying about the titles... I really like the "build your future..." and read it correctly. The other one I didn't read correctly and I missed "here." If you like the style of the titles (which I do), then perhaps you could put "here" in subscript like you did "your."

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  5. Thanks for the feedback! The Wilson Hall sketch is really a photo with a photoshop filter on it, nothing fancy. But it begs the question. Do I still need to cite its source even though it has been changed rather dramatically? Or does it fit in that legal grey area of altered images?

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