Last week I designed both a webpage and mobile page for a travel agency, this week I took that branding and made it into an atypical and informative brochure. In order to stay with last week’s work I kept all the typography the same and or similar and all the text box and background colors are in the family of blues. The blue is supposed to remind audiences of the abundance of beautiful beaches California has to offer. The front of the brochure has minimal text on it. It’s met to draw people in with the very distinctive Hollywood Sign text and all the bright and vibrant pictures. Then once you open in up you’ll see all the different places and activities the company offers in California.

One of the biggest challenges while designing this was making sure it didn’t look a typical brochure where everything is stuck on each singular rectangle and everything fits into a perfect box design. So when I created this layout I wanted to the front panel, the Amusement park panel and the Hollywood Panel could function on their own since many people read brochures one panel at a time and don’t unfold it completely in the beginning. But the other two panels on the inside of the brochure work in tandem because at that point the brochure would be fully unfolded.

A few techniques that I utilized from the 99 designs article “11 techniques for breaking the typographic grid” while designing was overlapping images and text boxes, utilizing the edges of the page by having some of my hand drawn icons get cut off on the page. I used wrapped text in many of the areas so that the text didn’t get lost in the mages that they overlapped.

Another example of a design technique was illustrating areas on the brochure. Like the Hollywood Sign panel. “Using illustrations in web and print design can balance out and overlap rigid grid layouts, giving compositions a playful look.” (Creger). I used the same technique when I was designing the webpages for this company in order to give both designs a fun and family friendly feel.

When first beginning to design the brochure instead of just drawing random things down a piece of paper. I went on to the site Canva and laid a few things out in different arbitrary ways to see what I liked and what I didn’t like then I took all the different assets and moved over to InDesign and designed a more complex version of it.

When formatting the text I already knew that I was going to be using the text “SF Hollywood Capital” for the titles because that’s what the main company name/logo is in, but on the website that I designed last week I used a regular sans serif and I ended up not liking it. So for the brochure in order to make sure everyone would be able to easily read it, even in the smaller parts I used the bold “Montserrat”.

Overall, I prefer this design to the original webpage designs I did. I like that the brochure had unconventional layout and that the background and accent shape colors compliment the vibrant colors of all the photos I had of California and the hand drawn icons that I used to overlap the pictures and text boxes really give it a sense of fun which is what the travel company is trying to sell to families when they book a trip to California.

Websites are one of those base platforms that every company needs. It gives you a home base for your clients to go to. They can see your product get a sense of your companies values and see that it’s not an online scam buying from you. But now a days you can’t just through all the info onto the page and make sure it’s spaced out enough for people to read on their computers. Now you have to have an appealing and easy to read layout for computer, mobile device, tablet and even watches.

For my website design, I created a webpage and mobile page for a travel agency based in California. Continuing with the importance of identifiable branding for the company, the color and text are bold and made specifically to evoke specific thought by the users. The whole website is designed using different shades of blue. Blue reminds many people of the beach/ocean, which is what California is probably most know for and the type is in the same fashion as the Hollywood sign which is one of the most recognizable symbols from the state.

This homepage was designed with the main idea of simplicity but also fun/variety. Following the steps that the “Web Style Guide” lays out in their section on page design. The company is clearly displayed at the top and the navigation bar is directly below, still towards the top of the page, and each tab is written in bold. Under that is a simple blurb about the state and a few pictures that stay with in the blue color scheme of the company. The fun graphics at the bottom of the page show the variety of fun landmarks California has to offer and pull people in and then once on the websites they can navigate to the other pages to get more info. The homepage is not supposed to be the heavy info, overwhelming part of the website.

The biggest part of the design from webpage to mobile was to make sure that the same amount info fit on to the page with out the user having to scroll down. Even after booking their trip through the website, they would still want to use the site to find certain maps and descriptions on different interesting places to visit while in California, so the customer would be more likely to use the mobile version of the site verses the desktop version.

Two differences that both versions of the websites don’t have are there’s no logo. This is because the company name itself is very distinct and acts as a logo in itself. The second thing is more specifically for the mobile version. In the article “5 Tips for Creating Great Mobile App User Interfaces” the author describes that the best place to put the navigation buttons at the bottom of the page because that’s where our thumbs are. :Usually, application UI elements are either placed at the bottom of the app (most common) or at the top” (Aarabi). In the case of this website they stayed in the same spot as the computer site in order to keep unity amongst both and not confuse the users. But also because this is a website and not an app, so naturally I would not look at the bottom of the screen on a website, but I would for an app.

In the blog post before this one I had to make a logo for a fake brand or company of my design. So I created the fun candle company “Cozy Candles”. Its main selling demographic are women in their teens and adulthood, hence the pink color and simple unique typeface. In this part two of the assignment we had to create an advertisement of some sort to promote our brand.

The add created above is what “Graphic Designs Solutions” would call a “consumer ad” since it is directed towards the general public and not a specific business or market. This add is also specifically designed for social media platforms and technological consumption. Most people are buying things based off sponsored ads on their social platforms verses seeing them printed in a magazine or news paper or billboard.

The process started with the physical subject of the ad, which is the candle, and then going from there. I originally had many different types of photos to chose from that I had taken. In the end I think many of these photos could be used in different kinds if ads for the company, but the add that I was going for is one that has the logo and the product dominantly shown and then minimal text on the post since most of the info would be in the comment posted under the photo.

I ended up choosing the one where the candle was justified to the upper left because the logo is justified to the bottom right so the two things would frame the composition well. I also used the simplistic other text to further frame the ad and have the eye easily circle the photo reading all the text and end up landing on our beautiful main product, the candle.

The ad also adheres and depicts the company’s values and brand identity. It used the correct shades of pink. Keeps with simple but all capitalized letters and doesn’t overwhelm anyone when looking at it. It’s supposed to be simple and calming to like just like candles are calming to smell. Another big part of the add is the fact that since you’d be seeing it on social media you’ll already have the company social handle readily available, so the most important info is the website since it is an all online product. That’s also why the website is in a box to further draw attention to it and it’s closest to the logo.

While this is just one ad, it does tell a story and evoke very specific emotions with the other things in the photo adding to it. The fancy gems and pearls make you feel classy and give the candles a sense of luxury and the flowers in the background subconsciously make consumers think about all the wonderful scents the candles can come in. But if I were to continue this ad campaign. I may start using those other photos with multiple candles in it to show consumers that you can’t just have one of our candles – you need them all to be at your peak serenity.

Creating a company with a good product or service is hard, but making sure that company has a good marketing strategy and brand identity is even harder. But it’s also extremely necessary. Pretty every company you’ve bought from or service you’ve used has been branded because it’s a way for consumers to differentiate between products. For this weeks assignment we were tasked with creating a logo to a fake product/company. At the time I felt stressed and really has no idea where I was going to even start this idea from so I lit my favorite candle in my room and then it hit me. I’ll make a fake candle company.

It started with trying to come up the name. Very often or not alliterations tend to stick in peoples’ minds more and I also wanted to the name to evoke a feeling. What more do you want out of the look and scent of your candle than to feel all cozy on your couch after you’ve lit it. Thus “Cozy Candle” was born. From there I went into the conceptualizing stage. In the book “Graphic Design Solutions” author Robin Landa talks about your brands visual identity and how it needs to easily identifiable, memorable, distinctive, sustainable and flexible.

With that in mind I created a simple but fun and easily identifiable logo. When designing you don’t want to have too many over whelming colors since it needs to be unilaterally seen by all types of people, which is why I stuck with simple white and black type. The pink candle in the middle is used as both letters, a symbol for what we sell and the color choice does show the sort of vibe and demographic that the company would be selling to.

When thinking about audience and sales demographic, I made it more for women in their teens and adults. Not to say men can’t buy candles it’s just not typically and this company is trying to brand itself best for the majority of people that would buy it products.

I also created a fully grayscale version of the logo since part of the brand identity is to make the brand/logo flexible and still readable. Since many things the logo might be printed in could be all black and white and because many people are color blind I had to see that the logo held up with out its distinctive pink color. In my opinion it does. The fun yet simple way that the “o” is a flame and the “l” is the candle stick, “sticks” with people even with out color.

Overall the logo is simple but fun. The type is very thin, but it has a light feeling to it which is good to be paired with candles since the scent of them is supposed to make you feel all light and comforted. The type face is also one of a kind since it was drawn by me and that’s a great way to brand one of a kind candles.

While studying different Milton Glaser color renditions, we were tasked with creating our own version. I chose to use the side profile of Harry Styles (one of my absolute favorite people on earth) and create a design that would be fun and remind people of one of his #1 songs, “Watermelon Sugar”. I also specifically chose a picture of Styles in 2015 when he had longer hair, so that I had more area to work with.

Here are a couple photos I used as inspiration for my Glaser design.

According to “The Ultimate UX Guide to Color Design” by Justin Baker, I chose to use both Analogues ad Complementary colors in order to make this design. Green and red being the complementary colors because they are opposite each other on the color wheel. Red and pink on the other hand are analogues colors because they are next to each other on the color wheel. I also chose to make each silhouette have a base color in each different color space. Red is one of the three primary colors, green is one of the three secondary and pink (magenta) is one of the six tertiary colors. For each individual silhouette I created different shades and tints of each base color. If I was actually painting this I would physically be adding different amounts of white and black to create darker and lighter tones of the base color, but by using a computer software each color is just a different hexadecimal. Which the guide explains as a color “specified with: #RRGGBB, where the RR (red), GG (green) and BB (blue) hexadecimal integers specify the components of the color.” (Baker). By using these colors I felt I had a good representation of all the different subsets of the color wheel and I knew they all went well together.

On the other side of my Glaser rendition is the emotional concept that went into its design. Each color give off its own emotion when it comes to how humans interpret them. This is why a lot of marketing and branding departments in companies use color to manipulate their consumers. We as humans also have preconceived notions about certain color combinations. For example, red and yellow make many people think about McDonalds and make them want those absolute delicious fires and that because the colors red and yellow actually induce hunger. When the colors orange, purple and black are together people usually think of Halloween and I feel that’s the same thing with red, pink and green. When you see those three colors together, especially with a nice light blue background you think of watermelon and fun summer days in the sun.

This is described by “Color Psychology in Marketing” written by Lindsay Kolowich Cox. The color red is known for bringing excitement and energy, pink is all about fun, femininity and creativity and green is very tied to nature and hope. All of that mixed together on a blue background which usually incites a very calming feeling is great mix of color to make the viewer easily view and enjoy the design.

For this project I chose to visual represent the word “music”. Clearly when we think of music we think of the notes that are strung together to make the music and just like music notes, letters get strung together to create words.

After reading about the different parts of a letter and what to do and not to do when designing in the “Graphic Designs Solutions”, I began to create the word in Adobe Illustrator. Obviously I couldn’t just type the word out and pick a font and call it a day. Instead I did start with a base font. I picked something that already had extenuated ascenders and descenders so I had something to work with when I was creating the music notes. Using reference pictures I was able to music certain music symbols that resembled many of the letters in the word.

Technically in order to design each letter I added swashes to most of the ascenders, descenders and terminals.

Another part of type design that I had to take into consideration was when the author Robin Landa, described the importance of integrating or not integrating the type into the other images it accompanies. Some designers would argue that the text is met to serve a purpose and give information so keep it neutral/different. Others believe the type is just as much of an art form as the art it accompanies so why not tie them together. For this particular project I chose to tie them together.

I wanted it to feel like the letters were just bigger and different looking music notes coming out of the boombox. This met that I did have to mess with the vertical and horizontal spacing of the letters. I understand that often times stretching, squishing, or kerning a letter can make it difficult to read and that according to Ellen Lupton in “Thinking With Type” stretching your type can also be a considered a “type crime”. But in this case, humans perception of sound is that it grows in order to fill the space that it’s being released into. So in order ton make the word feel like it was coming out of the boombox I designed in Photoshop, the letters had to gradually get bigger and fill up more of the space.

The final thing that I considered while designing the type was typographic texture/typographic color. When looking at music notes some parts of the note are much darker and denser, and other parts, like the stems, are much thinner and lighter. So when picking the font and then designing over it I kept in mind which parts should be heavier and which parts shouldn’t. In this instance I am also aware again that this type of letter design would be harder to read if were shrunk and put with a bunch of other words, but then again I feel the over design of the word would have to be changed because the entire layout of the piece would be different.

Overall, out of the few project we’ve done so far in this course, this one has been the most fun and the one that I want to explore more. I think the creative choices you can make when designing typography are endless and extremely interesting.