Simplicity and Clarity

Follow The Yellow Brick Road:

    This design is more than beautiful; everything about the brochure was very well done and deserves positive recognition. The major eye popping element of the brochure is the bright yellow color the designer decided to incorporate into the layout. This yellow can be found on the cover page and again on the inside, for now lets focus on the cover a page first and then go forward from there… Reading this was a struggle because this brochure is not in English however the design was far too beautiful to ignore.

    Found on the cover is the same yellow mentioned earlier, it is used as a highlighted background for the title or name of the company and was done very well. The yellow is placed very strategically behind only a half of the title, which doesn’t overwhelm the reader with brightness but instead gives it that pop of radiance that it needs. Also featured on the cover page are some images of architect, this is believed to be the focal point of the brochure. The imagery on the cover page is very stylistically simple yet still very elegant, these images range in different tones of cool greys, blacks and whites keeping with the ‘toned down’ theme. The cover page is very straightforward, it features a crispy bright grey background that the artist used allows the design hierarchy of the page to be the title backed by the beautiful bright yellow color behind it, which is of course the most important element of the page.

      Moving on to the inside of the brochure is where you will find the important information the business decided to feature which is very subtle. You find a text block on the bottom half of the first page and that’s pretty much it. The body copy is not much longer than a traditional paragraph keeping it short and simple for the reader and that is always ideal in a brochure. You can also see that the designer features the beautiful yellow color again to the left of the page, keeping it interesting to the reader because most people will flip right by a boring page full of text if there is no emphasis. The final page of the brochure is focused more on imagery and that was very well played by the designer; it ties in the final idea of the brochure leaving you with the impact the image leaves on you and very minimal text.

     This brochure was designed very well, with beautiful repetition of the color schemes and images used; the overall success of this design is defined by the effortlessness of its work - less is ALWAYS more! 

 Bursting With Excitement:

       This brochure is a traditional trifold, this allows for more room than the first brochure that we focused on and that can work out to be a good or a bad thing for the designer and the reader.  The cover page of this project is very well done, you have your design hierarchy which focuses on the main idea of the brochure which is social media strategies.  The design element on the cover isn’t bad. The artist used imagery to represent different social media icons making it more playful and inviting to the reader, they also featured a very straightforward typeface keeping it structured. You may also notice that the designer used a color scheme that may be familiar to some of the readers, the colors can be related to those used on twitter, a popular social media domain which also adds to the creative elements of the design.

        On the inside is where things get a little sticky you open up the brochure to quite a bit of information and it is placed allover. The first page isn’t horrible because you are guided with sub-headers making it easier to breakdown the information which keeps it cleaner but going forward isn’t so simple. The next two pages of the brochure appear to be a bit overcrowded and extremely heavy with information. The statistics were cool and the designer used them in a fun way but with all of the other information it can get very distracting to the readers.

       Also adding to the heavy load of information is the graphics used, there actually isn’t that much body copy in the document however the graphics make it appear to be more abundant and overpopulated.

       This brochure has the potential to be something great but the text should be more organized and the graphics should be toned down just a notch… The designer could have possibly dedicated half a page to text and the other half to graphics and the included the statistics chart this would give more breathing room and make it appear less intimidating to the reader – less is ALWAYS more!

Sending My Love

            I was extremely excited for the postcard project because I was thrilled to be able to use one of my own photos for a project, I couldn't wait to see how it would turn out and get started on it. My main objective for the postcard was to make it extremely simple, I wanted it to be informative so I felt that the text should be the most important element of the card opposed to images and design. The more I thought about the layout of the design I knew that I wanted it to be something that related well to my personality and had an elegant touch to it as well.. So for that I took to everyone's favorite search engine, google - here I found numerous lace backgrounds which I loved because of the colors, simplicity and I felt it would give the design great texture.

So here we are, I have decided on my photo and background.. Next that left me with color and text style which was actually still part of the fun stuff, I decided to correlate my entire background to the lace color scheme which was black and different hues of grays, so I decided to stay with black to keep it simple and toned down, I also feel like these colors communicate me quite well because they're powerful yet still a bit mysterious. For text style I wanted something that was elegant and simple, also keeping with the lace theme I had going on so I decided on something more fancy for the fonts an almost cursive, yet neater text for the body - and for my header which was my name I downloaded a custom font from an online website which I absolutely adored and I felt it went with the theme very well, it was loose and swirly. I really wanted to go with something more elaborate as far as the font was concerned because I didn't want to overload with design and as I mentioned above I wanted the text to do the talking, literally. Plus I'm a quite elaborate individual myself so I thought what better way to communicate that L-O-L!

For the design hierarchy I wanted it to be simple like the rest of the project, and I decided that my name was the most important piece of information, however looking back now I wish that I would have maybe used initials instead - something a bit more creative. My design hierarchy didn't quite turn out exactly as I wanted to because I ran out of space and I didn't want to make it huge and crowd the entire project so I decided to keep it toned down, it is still one of the first thing the eye grabs however not quite as powerful as I would have liked it to be.


When it came to putting everything into action in the Adobe Creative Suite it was actually quite painless. It is actually very fascinating to see your work in other applications and how easily something can be imported to the next program. The most tedious part of the entire assignment for me was the text wrap, I'm not quite sure if I was doing something wrong or if my image file was corrupted but the text wrap would not work together with my image, and I struggled for hours trying to solve the issue so eventually I found a way to make it work however the text isn't as close to the image as I wish that it would have been, I won't complain though. I really enjoyed learning how to silhouette images in Photoshop, its such a cool tool and I can certainly see myself using it in the future for personal projects.

Although this project got quite tricky at times it was an overall great learning experience seeing how well all of these programs can work together and how there are things you can do in one place and things that just aren't achievable in others. I used Indesign as my home base for the project and this is where I imported everything to, I also used indesign for my text and fonts. Photoshop came in handy for the image, here is where I silhouetted,edited and made any other necessary changes to the image and Illustrator is where I brought the background in and built it up, and how I created my own shapes which I wanted to correlate with the background and it turned out nicely. I would say this project was very helpful because going forward i'm certain that using all of the suites together will be necessary especially for the website that we will build. I also think that this knowledge will be helpful for our upcoming brochure project.