Newport Schools Brochure Rationale

When Kay and I first began our brochure design, we were hoping to achieve a fresh, exciting and new image for the Newport Public School Fine arts Program. We noticed that many brochures, websites, etc were extremely boring and cheesy when they attempted to promote their school's programs, and used out dated pictures to demonstrate the programs, which doesn't look aesthetically pleasing. We wanted to use fun colors, bright pictures and a fun yet informative font to create a brochure that people would find noticeable and pick up and read.

Some decisions we made were how to split up the project, and what colors we used. We wanted to use typical primary colors to demonstrate "art" and school, so we picked a purple because it was not a primary color but it sends a powerful message because it's a bold color. Other decisions we made were which fonts to use that were fun and childish to demonstrate the k-12 school, and the amount of type vs. graphic to use were very important. Because this brochure represents a school, we wanted to have lots of pictures of students and artworks; however, we needed to sell the school through writing out accomplishments, school names, contact information, etc. Balancing the two and using the right amount of white space was important to us.

In this project, I found importing or placing pictures challenging. I wanted to add our logo to the front of the brochure and also wanted to add multiple pictures on one of the panels; however, I could not figure out how to size the the picture the right way where the gradient was not harmed. I realized that it was simply scaling the picture the correct way that would fix the problem, and cropping out the logo created in photoshop that did the trick.

Some problems I encountered were, like I said before, figuring out how to place pictures into the brochure, along with figuring out the correct typography and placement of graphics and words so I didn't have too much white space. To solve the white space issue, Kay and I used other, smaller paint splatters to fill up extra space and add some extra color. We had a lot of purple background, and we felt like the brochure needed some brighter colors, so we used different colored paint splatters.

I am most proud of the logo and how it was incorporated into the rest of the brochure. Kay and I worked extremely hard on incorporating the ballerina, music, paintbrush and theatre faces into the logo and brochure, and the black silhouettes of each graphic made it look great on the cover. We used those same silhouettes to be a graphic beside each of the arts inside the brochure, so the graphics inside tied the brochure to the logo on the front. It feels more fluid that way, and I like how it all blends together.

If I had more time, I would have figured out if any other purples would be a good background color, or if I could add some more graphics to it. I think it looks great, but perhaps experimenting would allow me to find an even better fit for my background.