Tuesday, the 20th of November

20.11.2012

Slogan of the day: "A brochure is a microcosm of your business" (from http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Brochure-That-Looks-Professional)

Fig. 1

- Brochure-making job appeared to be a very pleasant kind of work to do - all thanks to my practice in poster design during my student days (I was designing film posters, to be particular), and my overall Photoshop experience. The idea for the background design haunted came to my head yesterday: instead of boring horizontal heading lines, no gradient and little to no composition, i decided to apply more elegant, soft curved (since our company is dealing with rotary equipment I thought it was logical) and gradient design. My first design came out of tried to expand its basic elements (that is - two curves forming a circle) to the brochure as a whole. The result was not quite as good as I've expected (fig. 1)

Fig. 2

Also pretty creative, it was never near neither official, nor readable. And this was the main requirements my design was to meet. So I went to plan B and, with the help of some simple tools like select rectangle / oval and fill (gradients was the layer effects), made it look like this: Also pretty creative, it was never near neither official, nor readable. And this was the main requirements my design was to meet. So I went to plan B and, with the help of some simple tools like select rectangle / oval and fill (gradients was the layer effects), made it look like this (fig. 2)

The big deciding point was the image of the propeller in the center. Firs of all, appropriate image was selected and carefully converted. Originally it was a photo of some computer cooler:

but I contured it, filled selection with monotone color and slightly changed blades shape. This clip-art-like image has been just as abstract and non-distractive (perfect for a background) as I wanted it to be. But the problem occurred when it was put into my brochure background. Originally I wanted the propeller to look slightly like the Turbine gemedesign company logo:

Fig. 4

That is tilted and turned into 3/4. But when I tried to leave it as it is, I suddenly liked it much better than how I imagined it (fig. 4)

Fig. 5

I reduced opacity almost to a minimum - the less distractive it looks, the better. My Beloved said, that with the propeller left untouched the whole picture resembles an eye. It was totally unexpected and spontaneous surrealistic side effect of my design decisions, but I found it really creative and stylish. So I stuck with it and that's what I came up with as a result (fig. 5).

- Trying to find the most appropriate font for the brouchure I stumbled upon this article: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Brochure-That-Looks-Professional, which I found very interesting. It is a careful and pretty thorough popular-science research, which goes in a very deep detail about a particularly design-related question: what fonts are better - serifed or non-serifed? Amongst all the "5 easy steps to do design" and "Follow our out-of-nowhere rules to be an absolute design guru" articles that floods the web, this one stands out and should be definitely read by those, who are interested in serious design study.