Posters, presentations, brochures and books should not look dull.
Through the power of layout they should engage your audience.
There’s a particular skill to creating dynamic and engaging layout.
Lets work together to make sure that your layout is doing you justice.
Beginning our examples with a classic:
The ‘before’ on the left of this dull one page flier was professionally designed.
The ‘after’ has almost exactly the same information but hums with dynamism.
How did Jeff and I crate such a dynamic flier from the static original?
- We banished the large blocks of text – they are uninviting and don’t draw the eye. Important information gets lost as the eye bounces off the chunks of text.
- break out the text, giving some parts of the text greater weight.
- We ditched the strong horizontal lines going across the whole page – this is a red light to the eye and stops it dead, never to continue.
- draw the eye across the page, guiding it.
- We switched up shapes – the original had almost all oblong shapes in every design element which resulted in a lack of variation.
- create different text, color and white space shapes which are lively and engage the eye.
Creating a dynamic booklet
A booklet Jeff and I created for marketing using his text is engaging and really holds your attention. We did this with the same principles as we used in the poster.
And lots of visuals – we used the illustrations I created for him and wove in some of his wonderful photos.
To create cohesion, we began and ended each section with the same visual, which also re-enforced the section. The visuals and the text should work in tandem and build on each other.
And finally, Jeff’s stall at a health fair, showing the wonderful designs we’ve created.