Tuesday 19 February 2013

Flyer design - Vintage Afternoon Teas



Earlier this year, I was delighted to be contacted by Gwyneth Brock, founder and owner of Vintage Afternoon Teas to discuss designing a new flyer to promote her business. The design brief specified the inclusion of homemade cakes, oozing with delicious fillings and the importance of using vintage china (as the hire of china is one of the services that the business offers).

My design work for the flyer started off with a series of photographs. I am fortunate to own several items of vintage china that belonged to my great grandparents and was lent various cake stands by teaching colleagues. I played around with different ways of arranging and stacking the china before settling on the two images that you can see below.
As Gwyneth wanted a ‘clean’ design style, I decided to create crisp line drawings in Adobe Illustrator. I could then experiment with applying pattern and colour in Adobe Photoshop. The patterns that you can see in the designs started off as scans of various papers and fabrics that I have collected over the years. Colours were changed and areas cropped out to make them more unique to the flyer design.
Surprisingly, the cake proved to be the most problematic area of the design. It was vital to convey the scrumptious nature of the cakes that Gwyneth makes. Although the initial designs complete with ‘button’ fruit look delicious I felt that they were lacking the ‘wow’ factor. Gwyneth specified that the cake should look homemade and have fillings oozing out of it. After several re-workings of the cake illustration (including scanning a car sponge for the cake texture!), I decided upon a two tier cake with fat fresh strawberries on the top instead of buttons.
 The final image went through several layout experiments in Adobe Illustrator in order to accommodate Gwyneth’s colour preferences and font choices. I initially used Giddyup Standard, Segoe Script and Poor Richard fonts until I discovered Gwyneth’s love of typewriter text. The final design uses Cooper Black and Courier New which has been ‘aged’ in Adobe Photoshop (good tutorial here). The font colour is teal (or more specifically Focoltone 2258). The final design (see top of page) looks effective on different sizes and will hopefully attract lots of new custom for Gwyneth!


13 comments:

  1. Beautiful!
    Just the kind of designs I like :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Susan, lovely to hear that you like the design

    ReplyDelete
  3. Your work is beautiful! I have the Crafternoon Tea versionson my coffee table at amanda bloo

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks Amanda for the lovely comment

    ReplyDelete
  5. I love elegant, clever, beautiful leaflet designs and that's exactly what these are. I think when an object can intrigue a person you've won half the battle of getting them to read your marketing. It can be such a battle - something very negative - to a lot of people, but like this it can put a smile on their face. Love it! Do you suggest going and delivering leaflets yourself or with a company? I usually take on a case by case, but my latest distributors have been great, check them out if you're in the area :) leaflet distribution birmingham

    ReplyDelete
  6. Really enjoyed the post thank you - some great tips and inspiration! We're currently spending a lot more time concentrating on more physical/traditional marketing forms and it's posts like this that give us the confidence that it is going to work. One thing we were having a bit of trouble deciding was the distribution/devivery of our marketing materials such as leaflets. We'd heard some bad things in the past about dodgy companies, but ended up settling on an excellent one who have GPS tracking to make sure you're not being conned! leaflet delivery birmingham

    ReplyDelete
  7. Funny flyers, i ll take it for my projects. Usually i am using www.poweredtemplate.com but there is no anything similar to your flyers. That's why i am choosing it.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Your articles make whole sense of every topic.eddm postcard printing

    ReplyDelete
  9. Its an incredible joy perusing your post.Its brimming with data I am searching for and I want to post a remark that "The substance of your post is amazing" Great work. postcard printing

    ReplyDelete
  10. These flyers are looking good. Designs is upon your choice. You can select any type according your needs. We are very good printing service provider. You can have your brochure printing at your home.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Your flyers are quite elegant and attractive, we also provide website design and development services globally.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Nice graphics...Have a look at my work too Best Branding agency

    ReplyDelete