Right, I’ll get stuck into my first ‘diaryesque’ blog and talk about what projects I’ve been working on today.Below is about a third of a brochure I’m working on for Escape Health and Beauty Salon.

This brand development has been pure pleasure mainly because it’s girly. I’m a girl, I like girly things, and so it stands to reason that I enjoy designing girly designs not that I don’t enjoy the corporate designs, but I do love a bit of pink, and in this case stars also.

The logo design for Escape was developed by myself and completed in December just gone, since then we’ve been developing marketing materials and so on..we’ve completed business cards, and shop front signage, the brochure has commenced below, and I need to start work on the website design soon.

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The top image is the front page, and the rest are the inner pages…there are several more to be designed and photos sourced for along this style theme. The photos have watermarks on them at the moment as there is no point purchasing the photos until I’m sure the client is going to agree them….she might not agree with all of my choices and this will then mean re-visiting the stock library and coming up with more suggestions.

The photography has been quite tricky with this brochure, and that is because due to the amount of text I only have a limited amount of space, so not only do the photos I source need to be beautiful and appropriate to the text on the page, they need to fit in the space and also not have bits of the head chopped off and whatnot.

It’s only whilst doing this project today and yesterday that I really realised how many photos don’t show the entire body of a person, most of them chop of the person or object in some way.

Then of course they all have a white background or worse to them and so I have to outline around the image and then delete the background….this is called creating a ‘clipping mask’ - it sounds difficult to outline round something very detailed, but it’s not too bad once you have good hand control, and obviously you can’t be a graphic illustrator unless you have good hand control.

I draw with the mouse, which I know seems odd when there are graphic tablets (connected to your screen and you draw with a pen in your hand instead of the mouse)Â on the market but I tried one - a decent one - yet hated it, and went back to my trusty mouse instead. It’s comfortable, and I’m used to it …..stuck in my ways, me? No! :-))

What I’ve also been doing today is a web 2.0 style corporate-ish logo design…that’s been interesting, and I might show you some images in a day or so of the completed design and how we got there.

On the non-design side of things I’ve been getting the Spring Truly Ace Newsletter together and hope to have that sent to the masses at Easter.

I have some freebies from some other businesses to give away - not rubbish freebies that require you to buy something first, actual real freebies, one of them is software, and also I will update subscribers on what’s new project wise at Truly Ace, and then tell them about this new blog! I’m very excited to be announcing the blog and hope it builds up a readership in due course.

Feel free to tell me what is boring chit chat and what is not and I will endeavour (maybe) to lean in the direction of what people want to hear.

Amanda

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 10:10 am and is filed under Design Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.