Final Project-Designer's Choice

For my final project I knew exactly what I wanted to do.  My cousin, Eric, is getting married in June, and although all the specifics aren't set in stone yet, I knew I could produce a peice to present to my cousin as a sample for their wedding.  After some thought, I decided to design a program to be handed out to guests as they arrive to the wedding.  I already had 2 photos of Eric and Maggie, his fiance, that I knew would be perfect for the program.

           PROJECT SPECIFICS

• 12'x18' (2-sided)
• Bleed 1/4'
• Margins 1/4'
• Folded piece (12 total "pages")
• Target audience: guests that attend the wedding
• Call to action: for the guests to keep in remembrance of the wedding

Even though I knew what I wanted to do, I drew up some thumbnails...

After drawing some thumbnails I still felt strongly about the wedding program idea.

I then made a fold up dummy for my project. This made it easier to look at when setting up layout in InDesign.  Here you will see the dummy unfolded.  You will see two sides.

Side 1

Side 2

This project was a lot of fun for me because it was something I could be proud of and potentially mass produce for my cousin's wedding.  Here i will provide a copy of my price quote to mass produce 300 pieces trimmed, scored, and folded.

It would cost me $301.25 to print 300 finished copies, which means $1.00 for each copy.

Here I will provide pictures of my final project:

(cover)

Direct Mail Project

Thumbs

On Left: Front Side

On Right: Back Side

I decided on creating a direct mail piece based around a diamond company.  The purpose of this direct mail piece was to thank a "customer database" for business with the diamond company.  I also provided an offer of 10% off any purchase if they brought the mail piece in with them.

Rough: Front Side

My final product however, did not contain the right side of this rough.  I actually trashed the idea of thank you (name) and used this space for the address.

Rough: Back Side

My target audience for this piece was male and female.  The front side of my mail piece would remain the same for each target.  However, the back side will change.  The name will change in dear (name). And depending on the gender of the name, the image will change. An image of a watch for the male audience and an image of diamond earrings for the female audience.  I had to write up specific instructions as to what image went with what name and so forth.

I chose black, silver and purple for my color scheme.  I picked these colors because purple is associated with royalty, which to me, I think jewelry.  Silver, symbolizes jewelry of course, and black as my background color so the purple and silver both pop out at the eye.

This project was a little confusing at times, given all the special instructions, template format style, and certain things that would not work with variable data, such as drop shadows.

Newspaper Ad

For my newspaper ad, I decided to advertise the new Shellac Nail Polish.  This is a nail polish that is guaranteed to not chip or smudge.  I used a fake salon name, "Tips 'N Toes", and provided a phone number and address and my call-to-action.  This was a newspaper ad, so everything was created in an InDesign file, using black and white.  I used different size fonts and some words in all caps to keep the ad interesting, since it was all black and white.  I also used a 12 pointed star polygon with the words "Walk-ins Welcome!" inside of the star in reverse type.  This drew attention to the eye, but not enough to be distracting.  I did however, learn something important in this project.  I used an image of nail polish that I found on Google (I know, I know...) in my file, so the quality of the image was terrible.  I now know that using Google images is unacceptable.  For one, being that I had no permission to use that image, and two, Google's images are low resolution.  High quality images are 300 resolution.  I learned the hard way with this mistake, and won't let it happen again!