JBU Honors Program T-Shirt Design
I designed two T-shirt designs for a local farmer's market, created for the purpose of screenprinting with no more than three colors.
Twin Springs Chiropractic: Brochure Design
CLIENT: TWIN SPRINGS CHIROPRACTIC
WORK DONE: BROCHURE CONTENT CREATION, LAYOUT, & DESIGN
This assignment was the first of four projects completed for my Advanced Design class during my junior year, and I set my ambitions high by working with a real client (pro bono). I reached out to a local chiropractic clinic in Siloam Springs, Twin Springs Chiropractic, run and managed by Dr. Brandon DeNike, who is awesome at what he does. He was more than happy to help me out with this project, for which I am forever grateful.
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Although I was daunted by the idea of sticking to strict deadlines and setting up times to create content for the brochure with Dr. Brandon, I really wanted to produce something that stood out in my portfolio, and I think I ended up with exactly that. He was wonderful to work with and very flexible, which I know will not always be the case for commissioned projects, but it was a great learning opportunity for me nonetheless.
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As is probably evident, I am by no means an expert on chiropractic medicine, and I knew a lot of research and back-end work would be needed to go into this project. Dr. Brandon was a great resource for me and I did a bit of online research on my own to get familiar with the terms and details of what it means to be a chiropractor.
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I think of this project when I think of my skills of art directing. I worked with a client's schedule, gathered information, satisfied my professor, met tight deadlines, hired a photographer, and made all these moving parts come together to produce a piece that I am proud of. It was a bit nerve-wracking, but this kind of work ethic gave me a lot of confidence when it comes to taking initiative. And, most incredibly, it all happened in less than a month.
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(PLEASE NOTE: the final brochure depicted on this page was not professionally printed, hence the alignment issues across the spine.)
Layout, Content Creation, & Photography
My first version of the brochure, without any text or images, relied heavily on simple design elements in shades of blue pulled from his logo. As a result, I think my first version was very rough and while it was a good starting point and got me to where I wanted in the end, it was hard to get started with almost no real content initially. Almost everything changed down the line.
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My workflow consisted of creating the imagery and headlines in Photoshop in spread format and linking those .psds to InDesign. The remainder of the text - subheads and body text - was formatted in InDesign. While I would have liked to start with Illustrator, I recognized that at some point I would be dropping photography into this brochure, and I would depend on Photoshop with that sort of imagery.
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I met with Dr. Brandon twice during this project. The first was to conduct a recorded interview with him where I collected a variety of information from him: a basic biography, information about chiropractic medicine, details about Twin Springs Chiropractic in particular, etc. I worked though a questionnaire that I had created myself and forwarded to him beforehand.
Once I had all this information, I could get to work writing the content of the brochure.
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The second meeting was a photoshoot featuring the incredibly talented and wonderful Josh Mast who took two hours out of his day to provide me with about 20 edited files of portraits, action photos, and environment photos, all featuring Dr. Brandon. I explained my vision to him and he understood right away: clean, bright, airy, simple. I wanted photography that I could easily blend into a white page and lay text over the imagery, and he provided me with exactly that.
Project Development & Brochure Prototypes
This project began with a brief, which is featured here (not on my branded stationery, sadly, that was to come with later projects). In the brief I outlined the description of the project, the target market, the deliverables of this assignment, the deadlines I had to meet, and what I would typically charge for this kind of work. The target market section was especially helpful for me to visualize, since it was a major factor in the type of copy and content I would include in this brochure.
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I built several rough prototypes which varied only slightly, as I already had a clear vision for the size and layout. I focused more on reordering the sections of the brochure to see what flowed most naturally. Almost immediately I landed on the unique idea of using Twin Spring Chiropractic's round logo as a die-cut cover, which would reveal the page below and serve as a unique point of interest. While the ordering of pages, design elements, and layout changed throughout this project, the die-cut cover stayed til the very end.
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I imagined professional photography, a monochromatic color palette, lots of white space, and friendly, simple design elements, much in theme with Dr. Brandon's big white office. I hoped to include a good amount of information without drowning the reader in text. With these goals in mind, I got to work on the first digital version of the brochure.
Layout Adjustments
Once I had all the content I needed from my small team of contributors, I finally got to the easy part of this project: dropping in my material and cleaning up the design. As much as this project grew my skills of communicating my vision, art directing, and content gathering, nothing beats just retreating to your desk to put it all together.
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I cut down on the graphics and played around with the photography. As daunted as I was that Dr. Brandon had incidentally worn a bright pink shirt on the day of the shoot, I found a way to incorporate it into my palette, and I ended up loving the result - something to break up all the blue.
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I perfected the layout of the text, utilizing both character and paragraph styles to keep everything organized and uniform. I kept an eye on orphans and widows, hyphenations, hanging punctuation, and the spine. One of my spreads featured some small text that ran across the spine which resulted in some readability issues, and while I was initially inclined to leave it, I spent a good hour reorganizing the content of the spread so that the spine fell across the edge of an image rather than text. Spot the difference below!
Final Brochure
I finished the die-cut cover version of this brochure by my professor's deadline, but I took an extra week to create a version without the die-cut cover since I imagined that the cost of printing may be relatively high for such a unique brochure. I wanted to provide Dr. Brandon a cheaper and simpler version in addition to something one-of-a-kind. It was thrilling to hand him a few samples of these two brochures in person, and he was incredibly happy with the result. I have yet to check in with him again and see if he ever got them professionally printed - I hope he did!
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I started off my Advanced Design class strong with this project. It taught me art direction, flexibility, organization, and the importance of client relationships and good connections. While I wouldn't say brochures or pamphlets are my favorite thing to produce, I do enjoy content research and creation, and this will go down as a favorite for sure.
