Archive for the ‘Brochures’ Category
Branding Design – Animal Buddies
Here is a branding design that I did last year for Animal Buddies, a small family run business based in Buckinghamshire specialising in pet services.
Since the client had just set up their business, they needed some branding designs. I helped come up the designs for their logo, business card and leaflet ad.
I wanted to design the logo to represent the family run pet business so I chose a bold round font in a light neutral colour to give a friendly and inviting look.
I kept the design of the business card simple to make the contact information clear and easy to see.
The leaflet would be in A5 size format, I carefully arranged the text and graphics by spacing evenly to make it easy to read in a small sheet.
Due to the amount of text required I had to make the font as small as possible but still readable at 8 pt. I used Object>Text Wrap in Illustrator to make the text flow around the images. I placed the contact details at the bottom of the sheet where it can easily be seen.
The final designs were exported to PDF with bleeding around the edges, ready for print.
Animal Buddies – www.animalbuddies.co.uk
Project – RKGO
I’ve just finished a project that I had been working on for about 4 weeks on and off, It’s a sample web page site for a made-up musical instrument company.
I wanted to create a site that was dynamic and interactive. My main focus was initially on the design of the website and a product brochure to follow, but I quickly realized I didn’t have any materials to work on and I didn’t want to use any existing product images due to copyright infringement, so I decided to use the 3D skills I have and quickly came up with a mock-up design in 3Ds Max, this took just over a day to model and render.
So after the RKHOS was born; I had something to build on and I used the rendered images to create a simple flash banner and the 3D model to create a short video ad. Premiere was used to edit the clips together and the audio was added in using a simulated piano software, since I don’t own a usb midi keyboard, I had to resort using the mouse to play the notes; hence the poorly played 1 note tunes.
For the brochure I used InDesign, I went for a vibrant dynamic look to add a bit more character and appeal to the pages. I used paragraph styles and columns to keep it clean and consistent looking. I exported it in pdf and swf format with the interactive page curl tool which is a cool feature in InDesign.
The design of the site had to be simple to navigate with all the information easily accessible but also include some sort of visual impact to give a nice user experience.
I had been learning a bit of JQuery in the early stages of the site design and found it to be a powerful yet fairly easy tool to use. I applied what I had learnt and used it on most of the dynamic parts of the site such as the faded transitions of the images and the tab menu buttons.
I used the fairly new HTML5 video and audio player functions to implement the media files into the site. First I had to convert my media files into the right compatible format for HTML5, for this I used Miro Video Converter which is a great simple to use open-source software.
I kept all the media files at an optimal file size to create a quick and smooth viewing experience with as little loading time as possible. The total file size for all the images is under 200KB which was well optimized but the problem I had was the video file is over 1MB which wasn’t ideal. So I did some research and found the preload=”none” function which tells it to start the video download only once it’s been activated.
The web page is quite media-rich in content and my aim had been to get it under 1mb in page size. I’ve tested the page loading site using some of the web tool sites and it calculated the web page size to be 532KB on one reading and 720KB on the other which was what I had hoped for and it’s all helped by the small preloading code.
I’ve tested the site on 5 of the main browsers and surprisingly I didn’t encounter any major compatibility issues, the JQuery script worked fine on all of the browsers which was great. I also checked on the older IE and it worked near perfect on all versions even on IE 6. HTML5 video and audio doesn’t work on IE 8 and lower but I have added an alternative hyperlink to the media files which shows up on the old versions. The drop down menu on the navigation also doesn’t work but the solution would be to create a separate page for each main category link.
I’m pleased with the final piece, it involved applying some of the things I had learnt in the past and also a few new things like HTML5 and JQuery which I think I’ll be using a lot more often now.
Brochure – Visit Zhaoqing, China
Click here to view a high quality online pdf of the brochure.
Here is a sample work that I’ve created of a typical holiday tour guide brochure. It’s a 3-sided brochure layout; front and back. This was done in InDesign and took about 2 days to make.
I wanted to improve my knowledge of InDesign and decided to use my recent trip to China as the subject for a tour guide brochure.
All the photos used in the brochure were taken by myself during my trip to China, the image of the map was taken from Wikipedia.
As it’s a sample work, I decided to focus my time on the layout design of the brochure and didn’t spend much of my time on the written content; hence the use of dummy text.
I began with creating 3 columns for the text; with a transparent fill background to make it more readable. I then added the panoramic photos and placed it at the bottom of each page which instantly made the design more brochure looking.
I used a gradient for the upper part the background and several photos set in ‘lighten’ blending mode which added more visual interest and blended the upper and bottom images together.
The thumbnail photos were placed with a 2mm text wrap which gave it some space between the text and the photos.
I went for a 3-sided brochure layout but the final design could easily be adapted for a two-page spread layout. I’ve incorporated a 3mm bleed so it’s all setup ready for print.
I enjoyed making the brochure and I’m pleased with the final result, I hope it has made Zhaoqing an appealing place to visit!