Design is powerful, and influential. As people, we heavily depend on visual stimuli to decide on whether or not to buy, eat, travel, or even right swipe on that girl on tinder if she's stylish enough. Here are a few examples of good and poorly designed media.
Travel brochures promote vacation spots, highlighting the potential experiences that are visually appealing to persuade people to come to the location.
Travel Brochures
The Beast: For a disney brochure, it's lacking quite a bit of magic. I'm trying to imagine how much hocus pocus is needed to save this. There is a heavy dosage of text, with little to no images that would help promote the destination; the typos included does not help either. The pictures seem poorly cut out, and just plastered onto the blue background, and who knows where the other half of Fairy Godmother's body is, seriously it's just floating there. There's nothing on here that shows what this place has to offer.
The Beauty: This one is a bit wordier, but carries more useful information, along with visuals that creates the expectation of "What am I going to see when I'm there." The cover image is full and vibrant, with the color temperature being warm and inviting. There is variation between the font face, A cabana-esque title on the front, with Secrets smaller skinner font that gives it a sort of mysterious allure. The overarching background is more of a beige parchment sort of layout, again adding this exoticism.
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Concert Flyers
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Concert Flyers
Concert flyers are supposed to grab your attention when passing by, and keep your attention long enough to find out what's going on. Of course whether or not people go depends more on what band is playing.
The Beast: The piece does a good job of using colors that are not commonly seen, so it stands out, and is an interesting take on the band's signature pig, I would give it that much. The text on the other hand is compressed, like really smushed together. The alternating colors in text is distracting when reading, making it all the harder to read.
The Beauty: Jeremy McKinnon, need I say more? I jest of course, well perhaps there is a partial truth to it. The flyer has a good contrast between the vibrant light of the image, with the darkness of the rest of the flyer. The flyer is using the image of the band itself in place of using their trademark vulture icon. The use of actual photographs makes it all the more personal, and allows the viewer to see what faces will be there at the show. There is a color consistency in which the color of the band name matches with the date and location to contrast the dark layout. The title is justified and centered, giving it a cleaner look. And centering Jeremy McKinnon.
Business Cards
One can tell a lot about a person or business by the look of the business card, and if there was any actual thought that was being put into it. Business cards are as important as first impressions, sometimes even more important seeing how if they keep it, they would have a constant reminder of the quality of the person who issued it.
The Beast: I'm looking at it, and wondering where to start. Let's talk font. WHAT. ARE. THOSE?! The typeface is somewhat reminiscent of a sketchy tattoo parlor in China Town, it is used everywhere, and is a strain to the eyes to look at it for a prolonged period of time. The contact information below is more of a handwritten sort of font, this often overused, not all that creative and almost just as an eyesore to look at as well. We can read that this person does photography, yet the images being used does not show any artistic prowess at all. Frankly, I rather let my 12 year old sister take the pictures for me since that's more promising than what this card is advertising.
The Beauty: This card is sleek, modern and pretty clean. It uses color contrast for the displaying and emphasizing content. Centered right, we have the company, and logo in a simple clean and legible font, with two slate arches filled with cerulean coming towards it, leading our eyes to the name. On the left, the contact information is neatly stacked in white on slate, using the same cerulean for the occasional ascents. On the reverse side, we have the logo and company name on slate, but typed in white. So in this piece we have organized content that's well placed, we have color contrast. It's simple and clean.
