I love design! Art was my favorite class growing up. Reading Robin Williams’ The Non-Designer’s Design Book was fascinating because I operate in art on a very intuitive level. Williams made explicit exactly what I had been doing on autopilot without knowing why I was doing it.
I try to stay away from developing art that feels static. Usually, if there is too much symmetry, it feels static, just as Williams points out about the psychic business card. I’ve always felt that you had to guide the user’s eye with the way you arrange the elements of art.
When selecting the template, I was immediately drawn to the asymmetrical diagonal line across three panels. It’s a bold statement. It visually calls the user to open up the pamphlet to see where the rest of the design is going, almost like a mini mystery. At first, I knew I wanted to have different comics in the line. Comics Plus had their own marketing materials, so I borrowed from theirs. However, it was visually not as interesting as I would have liked for two reasons. Firstly, there was a lot of color going on which, while it captures the bright, graphic nature of comics, also can be distracting. Secondly, I had to stretch the image a bit so it ended up a bit blurry.
To fix both of these issues, I decided to go with a monochromatic blue filter. It helped the design element of the bold line look more cohesive and it also hid the fact that the pictures were a bit more blurry than they should have been.
I used the web extension Colorzilla extensively to match my color palette to the colors of Comics Plus. It helped tremendously!
Question for Readers:
Is it wrong to create marketing materials with a color pallet that matches the logo of the thing you are trying to sell if it means abandoning your library’s own color scheme?
With my color choices, I’m technically breaking my library’s marketing rules, but I think that it’s a good rule to break in this circumstance. What do you think? Answer in the comments below!
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