It’s that winter time, brochure, design, deadline time, again. This season I truly started with a blank piece of paper, and the influence for this piece came from an interesting source. The Web.

I think web design has come a long way when print designers are being influenced by some of the looks that are in demand on the web. It’s been happening for a while, clients have tight budgets and want/need to have one designer who does all their creative, from soup to nuts. So print designers are having to do quite a bit of digital design and vice-versa. I have too, but I think this is the first time I consciously treated a design piece with a browser page in mind.

Web design that works, always starts with a grid. Simple. Concise and uniform. Everything has it’s place and whitespace is everything. It’s all about the user experience and the travel of the eye. Once established, pages mimic their brethren and only deviate slightly to achieve certain goals. Print need not. Each page can be different. I think it has to do with the media. If you’re holding a magazine and the layout keeps changing, you know you’re still holding the same magazine. With the web… a sudden new layout brings up the suspicion that user has been kidnapped to another site.

So I created a grid, almost a mental css and then I stuck to it like glue. A minimal variation in fonts, with no color introduced, other that the rainbow element at the top of each page. This allowed the pictures to really be punchy, I even boosted the saturation to give the feel of an RGB image.

Finally, I kept the look very sober and subdued. No flourishes. No need for ‘friendly’ script and splashy colors. Just because the prizes are trips to exciting destinations doesn’t mean the brochure needs to look like a Sandals hand-out.