Flyers Project

Overview | Planning & Drafting | Requirements

Scenario: the department has hired you to craft the content and design for a set of 3 flyers that will advertise the 415 Info Design course and a related series of visiting speakers. You'll have two weeks to create 3 flyers, plus a short memo explaining the design strategies used in them:

1. One flyer advertizing the 415 course (for next fall) at a specific campus location & targeting a particular student demographic.
2. One advertizing & detailing a talk (on one published article) by a visiting speaker selected by you from an Info Design subfield.
3. One advertizing the entire visiting speaker series, which will include another speaker selected by you, plus the author of the textbook.

After one week, everyone will present drafts of their 3 flyers to the class, along with a very brief presentation summarizing an article by the speaker chosen for Flyer #2.

Planning & Drafting

Please review the requirements below, plus the Williams "Extra tips & tricks" on flyers, and feel free to borrow any of her design schemes — her illustrations of the CRAP principles often show designs you could use.

Also, to make things easiest, you could create one design template reusable for all 3 flyers, eg with a shaded focal area for titles, another area devoted to details, etc.

Finally, take advantage of Word's capabilities:

• Explore fonts — and save any uncommon fonts you use (from C: >> Windows >> Fonts) to your own files in case you later end up at a computer without them.
• Explore shape tools, clip art, etc.
• File >> Page Setup lets you set page margins — and remember that we're just going to pretend we've got professional printing that will print all the way to the edge.
• Insert >> Text Box lets you manipulate your text easily, eg change its orientation.
• Format >> Font & Format >> Paragraph lets you change spacing, etc.
• To change your images to B & W, right-click and select Format Picture >> Color >> Grayscale.
• For text, shapes, or images, right-click and then use Format >> Layout to your wrap text, or layer things behind or in front of others, etc.

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Requirements

Design Requirements:

1. Each person's set of flyers should share significant branding elements, e.g., distinctive typeface, repeated iconic symbol, etc.
2. Follow Williams as if she were your god — CRAP principles, concordant or contrasting type, etc.
3. Black & white only (i.e., gray too).
4. On each flyer you may use one iconic image such as an arrow or triangle (which may be repeated & resized), you may use an existing departmental or university logo (though you needn't), & you may use an image representative of a speaker or the course.

Content Requirements:

1. Speaker-flyers must include significant synopses (50-75 words) about speakers' talks & importance to the field.
2. Speaker-flyers must include talk time & location: 8pm March 23 & 30 & April 6 at Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Lower Dodge Gallery, New Brunswick .
3. Course-flyers must include details about the course, plus registration & scheduling info — just use the registration info from this term.
4. There should be NO surface errors: spelling, grammar, etc.
5. All flyers should function to advertize 415 to their target audiences (eg speaker-flyers might say something like "Presented by the 415 Info...").

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