Dam to Dam Half-Marathon Invitation
Spring 2015
Tristina Meister I am going to create an invitation for the Dam to Dam race in May. This is a half marathon race that goes from one Dam to the other Dam in Des Moines. I want people to be excited to go to this event. I want to make running seem like a lot of fun even for those who are not adimate runners. For the race I want to incorporate the idea of a running shoe as well as making the invitation somthing that people will remember. I want to make people interact with the invitation. When you are training to run a race it is important what kind of shoes you are wearing. The shoes you choose to wear are really important so I want to incorporate the shoe into the invitation because the runner can understand why the shoe is so important. The shoe even makes a dierence to those who are doing the 5K or even walking, no one likes to walk in bad shoes. The tennis shoe is going to be the main part of my design.
I created an ivitation for the Dam to Dam Half-Marathon in Des Moines this month. When I thought of running a marathon I thought of the shoes that I would chose to run it in and how that would impact the success of the marathon. The shoes that a runner choses to run in is very important, if they do not have good shoes then their feet will hurt and make it difficult for them to continue to run. A shoe box is the solution I cam up with I wanted to capture the importance of the shoe with the shoe box. I experimented with different kind of lids for the box but left the box pretty much the same throughout. The first designs I drew were rough sketches and most of my focus was on the box and how I wanted that to look. For the first two I made a box with a lid that is not attached. I liked the idea of people being able to open it and have it fall apart so it was not a solid box. This is why I made the box with four rounded pieces on the corners of the bottom part of the box. This enables it to fold up into a box but once the lid is removed the box falls apart making it easy to read. In the third box I made the box differently and left the lid attached to it so it looked more like a shoe box and was easier to close. Once I got the measurements down and the box I wanted I started to work more on the inside elements. The three boxes I created all have different design in the center of them. Keeping with the idea of a shoe I wanted to put shoe marks inside the invitation making it appear as if someone ran across the page. I also chose to make the design have a road since it is a road race, the ending point of the race is downtown Des Moines so I included the skyline as if it was off in the distance. In the next design I tried to incorporate the racing bib in the bottom, but did not find that as successful. On the last design I wanted to make the road appear to have been made by people’s footprints, making it look like runners have gone by.
After the first critique I went on the refine the design we found the most effective. I went on with the idea of the road but incorporated the shoe prints onto the road. I also added the blue and green colors I was going to use on the design to get a feel for where I wanted to put the colors and how effective they would be. I also decided to put the Dam to Dam logo on the top of the shoe box as well as inside.
I then transfer the design to the computer. I added the shoe prints, more color and decided to go with the baskerville font. I placed the text where I thought it fit and created the right hierarchy.
I decided to change the road to just being shoe prints to get the idea of the shoe across even more. I moves some of the text around and made the design look less croweded.
The design for the envelope ends up being a lot like the inside of the box, in order to carry the theme throughout the deisgn. I was originally going to send the box with the address information on a piece of paper put onto of an actuall shoe box, a baby shoe box. I ended up changing this idea and made it into a wrapping paper kind of cover.
Transfering the envelope over to the computer I incorporated the same shoe prints as I did on the inside as well as the same colors. The logo was also placed on the bottom corners so people automatically know what it is.
Dam to Dam Half-Marathon Final Invitation
Front
Back
Left
Right
Inside
Inside with shoe
Final Envelope/Wrapping
Final Ready to Send