Every year, Southeast Technical College hosts a portfolio show for the media communication majors to strut their stuff in front of potential employers. Every year, the graphic designers each design their own identity for the show and vote on which will be used.
We’ll be looking more in-depth at the program book I designed and the inspirations I drew from.
Inspiration
For inspiration, I used one of my favorite tools: Cosmos. I searched for editorial designs with an “organic” vibe to them.
Editorial design in general is such a cool field. The designs that people come up with give me a lot of inspiration!!
I wanted the book to have clean structed text to contrast with the free-flowing and organic shapes of the identity.
I took the shape of the tittle from the “i” in the logo, and used that form to contrast the very square-ish nature of the book. I used this shape throughout the design. Stretched or hanging off the edge, filled or just outlined. I really enjoyed the relationship between the “sketch” style and texture and these organic, curvy forms.
Initially, I had the outlines in plain 100% black, but found it to be too distracting from the other colors. I reduced the tint to 50%, and it was much nicer on the eyes. I used this same tint percentage on all the other forms I originally had as black.
Here we see that relationship between organic shapes and clean text boxes play out. I purposefully made the tittle overlap onto the next page to lead the viewer’s eyes. Making the students’ names the only green color on the page highlights them as important as I wanted them to be.
I took some of these words from InDesign to Illustrator and turned them into outlines. Then, I experimented with rotation and being slightly above or below the baseline. This is to play into the naivety-type design and to emulate hand-placed letters.
We’ll see all of this being played out in the rest of the book, too.
Having the 50% tint with a paper fill and white background really lowers the visual clutter enough to place a title text on top. It serves as more of a background than a singular element. It’s composed of the letters from the logo, all stacked on each other in different layers to give depth. I really love how these title pages turned out. Playing off the background color on the next page to tie them together and lead viewers.
I used the accent colors as much as possible without drowning out the main blue shade used. I really enjoy the contrast of the main blue with the accents, as well as the one accent against another with a white/off-white to tie them together nicely and not have bad readability.
I used sample text here. I liked the use of a white background on the block of text, and since the tint is low, it’s not as abrupt a stop of the background. Using the same accent green here as before in the intro pages.
Same layout as the other title page for the major, but a different shade of blue. Tying them together, but keeping them separate. If that makes sense.
I enjoy the relationship of having text overhang from the edges of margins and shapes. It breaks the box that everything can seem to be in if we don’t do that. I used the same accent color for the “we’d like to acknowledge” part as the people to tie that together. I justified and added leaders to the faculty and their programs for ease of viewing.
I used the margin as a hard edge, for the left page, to add some contrast to the tilted title text and organic shape. The title is tilted to add motion and to call attention, as it’s the only text that’s on a straight baseline, and also, all the characters are tilted to the same degree. I really enjoy how I fit “KEY LEARNING OUTCOMES” next to “FOUR”. Also using the same accent color of “FOUR” on the actual four listed outcomes. Leads the viewer’s eyes and highlights the important information. We did that with the light blue accent color, too.
Fun little page. I like the word “doodles” and it keeps with the theme.
This page would be the back cover for the book. I decided to go with a pretty simplistic look to end on. The heavy contrast of a plain black background with the simplified logos is super eye-catching. This was one of my most complimented pages of the book, which reinforces its placement and design in context with the other pages.