A couple of years ago I designed the year book cover for GSCE. The old look is dated and a new one is required.
Here is how I designed the new cover…The cover was made with Xara Xtreme Pro, a quite unknown vector graphics software (perhaps because it’s Windows only, and doesn’t have the behemoth marketing machinery). The advantages with the software is speed and you can export your art in the PDF/X format (shortly put, it’s ready for commercial printing).
This was the year book cover I made a couple of years ago, and now it was time to update the design. The old design was regarded a bit restless and a more subtle version was asked for.
GSCE stands for Graduate School in Chemical Engineering, and is a collaboration between four Finnish universities. The official logo (the GSCE spheres with text) and at least one photo from each university should be included on the new cover, and the backside should only contain the contact information.
My idea with the previous design was to use the spheres from the logo as molecules on the front cover, and on the back cover they had found their positions to form the logo. That was about to be skipped, and photos from the universities involved should be used instead.
The photos were in different formats and sizes. I first played with cropping and placing the photos on the page, but i couldn’t find a good layout. I then thought about forming some kind of grouping shape or container.
Placing them in square blocks made the look too stale and static. I tried tilting the box but it still didn’t look good enough for me. Tilting only the outer shape didn’t work either.
Hmm, maybe a circle would look softer or more dynamic. By tilting a circle which had been cut in four equal sized parts it started too look like something useful!
By studying the images for a while I came up with the idea to use the “flow” in the photos, aligning them in a way where the reader is lead to the center of the circle.
Here is the final version.
The final design was exported as PDF/X where I checked the option for converting fonts to shapes to avoid possible problems with fonts that couldn’t be embedded. The resolution for exported bitmaps was set to 300 dpi, and the color profile was the default SWOP profile.
2 Comments
nice work i like this
i would like to fins a nice cartoon cover for my new cook book with a funny looking lady on it with some humer