Visual Communication Newsletter Design: Tuesday Lab

Below are the newsletter designs that Spring 2014 students created for fictional clients. Each team brainstormed about the kind of organization they would use, then designated three adjectives to describe the personality of that organizations. Visual cues such as color, imagery and typeface were chosen based on these adjectives. Students mocked up their assignments with images from The Noun Project and Shutterstock.

Vibrant, Authentic, Lively

Classic, Structured, Peppy

Contemporary, Cheerful, Creative

Trendy, Classy, Modern

Visual Communication Newsletter Design

Below are the newsletter designs that Summer A students created for fictional clients. Each team brainstormed about the kind of organization they would use, then designated three adjectives to describe the personality of that organizations. Visual cues such as color, imagery and typeface were chosen based on these cues. Nice work!

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Lab Week 6: Newsletter Design

In lab this week each creative team was tasked with coming up with a fictional organization. Teams then assigned three descriptive words to that organization, established a target public, and chose colors, content and typeface accordingly. After some brainstorming and rough sketches, the teams went to InDesign. The results really exceeded my expectations. Check out each group’s work below.

Team Anonymous “Strength” “Motivation” “Endurance”

Team Blue Elephant PR “Edgy” “Innovative” “Safe”

Team Communigators “Modern” “Young” “Sustainable”

Team Creative “Energetic” “Trendy” “Young”

Team Envisage PR “Fresh” “Healthy” “Local”

Team Gator Communications “Green” “Healthy” “Wholesome”

Team Is That Us? “Trendy” “Fun” “Nutritious”

Team MCFC “Innovative” “Relaxing” “Soothing”

Team PR and JAMM “Fun” “Safe” “Adventurous”

Team PRangers “Modern” “Youthful” “Edgy”

Team PRoblems “Fresh” “Modern” “Chic”

Team SAMAN “Trendy” “Fun” “Wild”

Team Go Wilarkey “Colorful” “Vibrant” “Fresh”

Lab Week 5: Color and Type in InDesign and Photoshop

We began lab by opening a photo in Photoshop and picking up a color with the eyedropper tool. We were then able to view all the various color model values for that color: CMYK, RGB, Pantone and the hexadecimal code (read by browsers). This is useful for creating repetition across various platforms.

Lab Week 3: InDesign Tutorial Continued

This week we continued working on the InDesign brochure we began during Week 2. We also began work in Photoshop, discussing image resolution, dimensions, and maintaining proportions.

The all-important Image Size dialogue box in Photoshop

Bleed Lines

We discussed adding bleed lines. For a better description of the how and why of bleed lines, check out this description from printernational.

Image Resolution and Image File Formats

Many of you also expressed interest in image resolution and image file types. For print, images should always have a resolution of at least 300 dpi (dots per inch). Web resolution (low resolution) is generally 72 dpi.

We will cover more on image resolution and file types later in the course, but for those of you who would like to jump ahead, Lynda.com offers some great tutorials on this. Check out Print Production Fundamentals Ch. 8, “Examining image formats” and Ch. 9, “Looking at image resolution.”

Lab Week 2: InDesign Tutorial

InDesign and WordPress

This week in lab we set up our WordPress blogs, created an introductory post, and began working in InDesign, a program in the Adobe Creative Suite that is useful for designing print tactics such as fliers, posters, brochures, and invitations, to name a few. Each week the tutorials for these programs are available in Sakai under the “Lessons” tab.

InDesign Tutorial

You can download the InDesign Tutorial pdf (111KB) here. It covers setting up a three-panel brochure (as explained on Lynda.com), creating text boxes, and formatting text.