Danisa Valdez

Design Approach: When I first made sketches for this project I had about 10 different designs. I made 5 gate fold sketches and 5 double gate fold sketches. I really liked the images that were available so my sketches had many images on them. When I first started designing on the computer, I realized that most of my ideas weren’t going to work out as well I though. There was one sketch that I made (which I ended up using) that had 3 pictures on one fold, a picture of the garbage truck in the snow (my favorite) in the middle and words on the other fold. It was my favorite sketch and I knew it was going to work. When I put the images and text in the appropriate folds, my idea came to life. With the proper duotones and organization of the different colors, I thought it was best to alternate the grayscale and pantone.The three images on the fold were grayscale, pantone and grayscale, the large one in the middle was grayscale and the text to the right was pantone. My pantone color was a mixture of black and gold; although I wanted a metallic gold, the paper and printer did not give me that option so I created various tones of the pantone to make such pictures slightly lighter than others. The layout on the second fold has the subtitle on the top and 4 pantone images of different workers faces. With that, I wanted to create the illusion of a (still) slideshow, a preview of whats to come afterwards with several pictures of welcoming faces. I used the negative black space underneath to my advantage and put the information on the bottom right corner with the date several points larger than the rest of the text. On the front page,I simply put the title in caps and the image of a garbage bag being through in a dumpster, both pantone colors. My approach was mainly to keep it as simple as possible by mostly only using the organization of colors and size.

Paper Choice: I liked ‘Classic Crest- recycled natural white 80C classically permanent classic crest cover’ because of the texture and the matte feel and look. I thought that the matte was a good fit for the simplistic feeling I was trying to achieve. I also liked ‘Classic Laid- classic laid cover peppered moss 80C foil stamp’ because the paper had a unique feel to it and also the foil stamp; I think my invitation would look complete if the words ‘SanMen’ (which are vertically written) were in the form of a foil stamp, to bring out the gold color and the meaning behind the message.

Typefaces: I used the typeface Adelle because it I thought that its serifs gave it a more distinguished look.

What I Learned: From this project, I learned that folding and cutting invitations are very difficult. They require a lot of detail and a focused eye. The organization of colors and size and typefaces make a big impact when a viewer is seeing it for the first time and in this case, whether they decide to go to the event or not.  I also learned the minimum size that USPS accepts to be delivered through their system.