The Snowkite Centre leaflet design

This project was helping out a friend, he already had an idea for the design but just wanted it tweaking and smartening up.
The snowkite school he is starting in Italy plans to work with The Kitesurf Centre by advertising to the Kitesurf students there and to try and bring them across to Aosta near the French border in Winter for some snow kiting.
I first showed him a few other leaflets to help with some ideas and looked at the current website - uk.snowkitingcentre.com

Here is the first design that we came up with:

This looked ok but we decided that the "Lessons and Hire" was the most important text on the page and needed to stand out a little more, we looked into making a curving white line between the text to make it look like a snowboarder had gone down a mountain. However we soon found that this was very difficult and didn't looked good so we took the idea of the Bold white block around the text on the kitesurf centre leaflet and tried with that.
We also thought that the whole document was a little flat and lacked a bit of life and the winter feel that it needed.
Here is what I came up with as a finished product:

The new pin shows the location a little better.

The "lessons and hire" really stand out well and the snowflakes bring a nice sparkle and winter feel to the whole experience. The large snowflake has also given us an idea of where to go with a logo so this should be coming soon.

See more on the subject at the snowkiting centre

Oystercatchers Holiday Cottage Camber

So for this latest project I was asked to design an entire range of marketing material for the customers, this included Website, leaflets, Logo and even some stickers for marmalade and Jam pots.

Initial Planning

Logo and colour choice, while this began the customers chose a name for the cottage - Oystercatchers. This we deemed showed that it was good for birdwatchers but without alienating families who were looking for something near the sea but might not know the connection with something less obvious.

From there I had a few ideas but the main one revolved around making a bird in flight look as basic as possible so that it could be used in a vector style design.

Here you can see the type of bird I was using and the variations in flight angle that I could use.

This I decided showed the most shape to the bird and colours however I did like the look of it with both wings up.

Here is my initial ideas

The clients liked this idea of the other designs so I went ahead using this.

Leaflet

The first issue here was getting a decision on how many sides and the size of the leaflet. To make this easier we collected a large number of competitors flyers/leaflets and any that we liked the look of and laid them all out. This was a very simple way to find the clients needs and preferences, size, colour, fonts layouts were all roughly agreed upon, I went back and made a few ideas of fronts and backs, here are the two final ideas:
    Front                                                                           Back

  

These were about the 5th or 6th edit, there weren't really any big changes the key this was the readability, I enlarged some text, removed others and simplified the map. We all liked these and after some editing to the photo's to lighten some up and make the roof look a little tidier it was off to the printers.

Note: Always make sure you image is saved as CMYK for this otherwise it will usually come back looking not quite as bright as it the RGB that you would have been looking at one your screen. Easiest option is to always work in CMYK and when working online use websafe colours so there is no change on different browsers.

Website

With the rough idea on leaflets sorted through seeing others I used the same method to help diagnose their true wishes for the site.
The key parts that we were aiming for was a "light" site in more than one way, firstly keeping it bright with a white background and also something that is simple and not too overwhelming.
For such a simple design I decided a basic wordpress site would be most efficient so with an appropriate theme installed (lenora) I began.
The header

This I found showed not only the name but also what the site was about and roughly where while also covering up some of the wordpress theme's standard header.

I then took a few photo's of the site for use in the galler (gallery) and on each page before creating the front page (Holiday Cottage Home page).

From here the further pages were designed each with an important section just below the menu, such as an image, map on where it is or a booking calender. To complete the booking and gallery NEOgallery and Bookings plugings were both used. The site was created entirely using free plugings and themes keeping costs down while still keeping it simple enough so that the owners can organise bookings without need for technical support.

Check out the site here: Camber Holiday Cottage

All of my designed sites are hosted at JustHost and usually purchased through GoDaddy.

For further detail, a breakdown on any of my work or interested in having me design for you please don't hesitate to contact me or visit my site - www.rupertcawtedesigns.com