Event Mailer
World Food & Music Festival
Kelsey Beyer
To begin my design, I closely examined the concepts that were brought into class from past students and from professionals creating other paper items. I was drawn to the idea of having multiple visible layers after looking at a book with many layers that all worked together to create one image. Then, I created mind maps to find relationships between the event choices and words that might be able to help me design something more interesting than the everyday mailer.
After going through my mind maps and determining which ideas I liked best, I began some research outside my mind that related directly to the event I had settled on: the World Food & Music Festival. I came up with three ideas for my preliminary round: 1. a plate of sushi, with each piece of sushi having different information about the festival on it, and other international foods for invitations to friends.
I found this image while researching the festival. It largely inspired my earthy feel, along with using more colors than just the red in the logo. I decided it would be interesting to use the original logos seen on the website, but in the colors that match my theme and idea.
2. a suitcase with a similar idea, but instead of pieces of sushi, there would be different pieces of clothing known for different areas of the world. 3. a booklet with a simple, earthy feel that allowed me to incorporate the layers I was looking for: cutouts on the front revealing images on the pages beneath.
Everyone agreed the booklet was the strongest idea. Pictured: the cover and “sneak peeks� of my original design - each word matches up with an accompanying logo illustration.
The next steps were to put together my logos, choose my colors, and match two typefaces together. I had these ideas in my head for a while, so this process wasn’t too bad. For the logos, I took the ones from the festival’s website and changed the colors to match what I wanted. I knew I wanted said colors to be red, yellow, green, and blue to keep the simplicity feeling and give the invitations a very welcoming, all-audience-encompassing scheme. Instead of bright, true colors, I edited the CMYK values to create more muted, earthy tones. Finally, I use Avenir as my go-to typeface for anything I can. I felt that it would apply well to this concept, too, especially combined with a thick, scripted font, since Avenir is thin and lacks artistic flairs. I chose Caprica Script, a font I found online, as my thicker typeface.
World Food & Music Festival Downtown Des Moines, IA
One of my favorite steps in the project was determining how to arrange my document to print and be cut in a way that would achieve my goal. I lined up each image with each hole it would show through, and, at the same time, made sure each of those images was in the center of each tab. Each tab needed to measure 1.5 inches in order to equally span the height of the booklet at 6 inches. Cutting out the holes and tabs was not quite as fun as laying them out on the computer... Computers are much more perfect than rulers and xacto knives!
I made three major changes to my design:
After I printed and assembled my booklet and envelope on plain computer paper, I chose nicer, thicker, colored papers to create the final renditions from.
1. I had to make the text on some pages bigger in order for it to be read easily. For it to fit on one page, it had to be size 6 to fit. This is the size a caption typically is set at, so I needed to increase it to a body size of 8. To do so, I reformatted a couple of pages by taking out some information and by splitting information up, which leads to my second change.
To keep the inviting, hip theme, I chose a nice thick, textured white paper for the inside pages of my booklet. They stand well as compositions on their own yet still look nice when added together in a booklet.
2. I added another page entirely. My Music & Activities page was too crowded and held too much information. Instead, I split the information up into two separate pages, one for music and one for activities. I gave each page an identical tab since the information goes together, and put the activities page directly after the music page. This solved the problem extremely well.
For the front and back covers, I chose a thick paper that resembles a brown paper bag. This fit perfectly with the overall feeling and style of the booklet.
I began printing and discovering changes I needed to make in order for my booklet to be absolutely perfect. I also needed to perfect the binding of my booklet.
3. My final (and smallest) change was to make my logos within the holes a bit smaller. They were too close to the edges of the holes, and it led to possible overlap due to any tiny amount of trimming error.
I made the binding out of a thinner grey paper to match the grey circular border on each of my logos. Finally, I chose thick colored paper for my envelopes to give them a cheery, “open me� design.