My Work with InDesign

Event Flyer

For the Laguna Beach Sawdust Festival flyer I decided to stick to just a few colors, putting the whole thing on a forest green style background to make my other lighter colors pop better. For all the color considerations I looked at pictures from the previous festivals and used colors found in those pictures. The logo itself was from a shot that I thought looked pretty good in photograph form with the word "Sawdust" over a cool window design. So attempting to make my windows I used the rectangle tool and made some subtractions to get the slanted edge on top. I liked the way the font I chose looked when placed over the windows so I kept it and added Sawdust Festival over the top of it.

For the text I decided to split it into a few different boxes so it wasn’t all one big block of text. Splitting into 3 different boxes and wrapping around the logo gives the text some visual interest. I decided to go with a different font for the second box of text because those were the key elements of the festival, I also bulleted the list to draw more attention to it. That part felt like the selling point of the entire festival so I tried to make it stand out. I also really liked the way that particular blue stood out against the dark green background, had some really nice contrast to it.

At the bottom I added the rest of the text, giving it the same font as the top portion of text to not overwhelm with too many fonts. I then centered the website address to make it easy to spot and important to the flyer. I wasn’t sure how my printer would handle printing out this full page document and I see the margins messed up the L in Laguna a little bit, but everything else dodged the cut, that’s something that could obviously be fixed in real printing.

Calendar

Calendar Explanation My calendars are pretty standard, with the picture on top, followed by the grid of dates, the fact below that, and the coupons on the bottom so they would be easy to cut out. At first I had the facts below the coupons, but then realized that by cutting those out it would also remove the fact. The pictures are all photos of animals and humans, like the project said. The picture is at the top because that’s the first thing you want someone to see when they look at a calendar, followed by the real information, the days of the month.

I put the month in the picture to not make it just another big block of text, but sort of interact with the photo a bit. It makes the info less immediately apparent, but the places they are in the photo are pretty clear. I tried to remake the document with no margins, but apparently my printer cannot handle a no margin printing assignment. I built the core layout of the document in the master then changed the photos and facts to be different, and the days of the month. The grid remains on the calendar because that's what every calendar has, so the user can write things in the blocks. I tried to fit everything on the page so that the calendar was the easiest to see, since it's the most important, the picture is eye catching and the coupons are easy to access. Overall, I wish my margins would have worked, but I think the calendar turned out alright.

Menu Design

For my menu design I followed largely, the layout we made in class. A simple two page (or one page front and back) design with one fold, giving the menu four pages. It was a bit tough to fit all the menu items on three pages, so that I had access to a full front page, but with some slight size adjustment of the text and fonts I managed to get everything on the menu. Since the restaurant wanted to print new menus every month for their new monthly special, I put that front and center, since it seemed pretty important to the Shoppe. My first special was John Lennon inspired, with his Hollywood star being the picture. The Hollywood star seems like a great idea to use for the pictures since there are a lot of stars they could use for that, and a decent picture of every star would not be too hard to find. The item I made for it is full of terrible puns based on Beatles’ songs (I had fun making it, it’s dumb).

I also made a couple of styles to apply the same thing to all the celebrity names, headers, and the actual description of the food. I put a paragraph rule under the headers to make them easy to spot. The space under the last menu item on the back page I put the standard come back again slogan, along with a director chair for some more Hollywood style iconography. The address is on the front page, centered in easy to read font, nothing really special done to it because it needs to be simple, just trying to convey the important info. The logo is at the top and the front page has a decent amount of white space on it, to avoid a large amount of clutter. That’s about it, I tried to make the menu as easy to read as possible while still adding some interesting things to look at and add an easily changeable spot for the monthly special.