Exercise: Visualising your ideas

For this exercise, I have a task to explore different ways I can folder a paper to make a leaflet. I have been asked to design a leaflet for the organisation, inviting people to volunteer for a task. I had a look for some ideas and sort of inspirations, that I could probably transform. As I had some experience in leaflet designs, but most of them were made in trifold (letter fold) A4 format, I had a look for designs with a shaped cut. I thought that I would like to experiment with formats.

Keywords

• Leaflet
• Volunteer
• Creative
• Community

Mood Boards

Some original ideas for leaflets design shaped cut, complicated folding, pop up designs. I always liked the idea of creative flyers, when a flyer gives you the first impression, and you are as a customer has a curiosity to learn it, and have a look what is there inside.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Most designs that caught my eye were made with different shapes, and they looked like an individual product, which is the part of the company presenting. If I’ve been asked to do designs in an original way, I would probably suggest creating something unusual, with complicated folding, but minimalistic text information, but at the same time that depends on the clients budget and timing, as that kind of printing is time-consuming.

Thumbnails

After a mood board researches, I went through some generic researches, to find out what kind of leaflets are the most popular for printing. After that, I did some sketches for the leaflets folding for the building of the community garden.

In addition to the leaflet sketches, I tried to reproduce leaflet design with complicated foldings. Where I had 8 sides to fold up. I’ve found some tutorial videos to follow, as it could help me to find out some new ideas of working with a paper. Below are examples of A4 formats leaflets.

Leaflet idea 1

I created some sketches for the leaflet idea with the tree-shaped cut. The idea was to keep the shape of the leaflet like a tree, but later I decided to leave only top with shaped cut, otherwise, it would be too thin to fit any text in. So, my first trial came up in the shape of a tree, euro format 100×210 mm half fold, full-size 200×210 mm, so when you open the leaflet you have the kind of open tree. That was my association of the volunteering to create the communal garden, where people would come to enjoy their time. Inside I’ve made some sketches of the trees, that could be the background to go underneath the text information.

• 

• 

• 

Leaflet idea 2

This leaflet idea came from the volunteering to join the building communities. So, I thought I would like to play with a shape of the leaflet. This design works well to hang it on the house’s door. I liked the shape of that leaflet, but it was not according to the complicated folding.

• 

• 

• 

Leaflet idea 3

Another my design was related to the shape of the house to volunteer to build community houses. I played around with the leaflet format, trying to fold the paper in a couple of ways. After that, I did some sketches in Adobe Illustrator, as I’ve noticed for me it’s easier to see the result in colours. I think that format could work very well for attracting people attention, as you have a temptation to have a look at what is there inside.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I think I would recommend giving that leaflet by hand, but with the one exception, that people who sent that promotional material would have a conversation with potential volunteers, that to give them some basic induction into the idea of the campaign.

In a conclusion, I would like to say that making mockups for the brochure is quite an important part of the leaflet design planning. I’ve discovered there is a lot of type of brochures, starting from the half fold and going to the accordion fold. I think the complexity of the design depends firstly from the budget, and secondly, from the customer design preferences. For example, if the customer would like to create a complicated fold, it could be thin paper, if it would be standard euro brochure, we could use decorative paper, or that is always space for photographs of volunteering people, but it would be generic design. There is always a chance to have attractive images to sell services to meet customer expectations.