A concept traveling brochure for a fictional town in northern California. This is a re-designed school project. A goal I had with this project was to step out of my comfort zone. I have a tendency to rely too heavily on illustrations. It’s a bias that someone pointed out to me. I wanted to avoid getting stuck in one pattern and one way of solving an issue, and work with photography more often in my designs where applicable.
I used orange and blue to represent the bright sunny weather of California. Those two colors are usually associated with in the US with summer, sunny California, and fun, especially in kid brands. These things represent impressions of what non-Californians think of California.
Brother 1816
Bold
Bold Italic
Book Italic
Traveling brochures by nature have a lot of pictures. I wanted to emphasize the local culture of this traveling brochure make it clear that there is more to a small town than its big events. In addition, I experimented with the layout and photography presentation as a way of representing the idea of “wide open” spaces out west. My approach to this was to use images with lots of “negative” space and set up as scenes (like a movie or story). Part of the design goal with travel brochures is to give that picturesque snap-shot of a place. The images on the outside of the brochure depict nice places you might see driving into town. The images on the inside are places you’d visit in a small town. A nice themed story told between the photos I had available to me.
For this project I left the city branding to a style and a word mark instead of making an icon for it. It feels more authentic for the small town vibes that would be attractive to the viewer. I didn’t want the brochure to come across as a resort, where there is no real heart or soul to the town.
I went this route for a number of reasons but specifically because of an incident where I briefly visited a small town and came back a few years later only to find that the sweet lovely town had been gouged out by multiple resorts and no one really lived there anymore. It was very depressing. I remember feeling like a tiny part of my soul was crushed. Tourism at no point should eliminate a town or city. I wanted the reason for people to visit this fictional town to be to enjoy the town itself for what it is and not one or two resorts.
While re-working this project for my portfolio I tried to keep it from feeling too busy. In previous versions there was too much static. It was hard to focus on any one topic or section and the amount of pictures leaned too close into pointlessly busy. An important part of the brochure was to avoid overwhelming the viewer.
The pictures as the background, put an emphasis on places in town and in local nature was an intention to highlight that the town as a whole was worth visiting. There is something for everyone in Kettering California and maybe something you weren’t expecting.