Exercise: Visualise your ideas

This exercise focused on two things, the different ways of folding paper and how to properly visualize your ideas. Overall the task asked me to design a leaflet for an organization inviting people to volunteer for a task. The task I chose was restoring a garden for a church. Now once I found my cause I decided to experiment with different ways of folding paper and also ways of conveying information. I started drawing thumbnails to get the ideas from my brain to paper. However sometimes my problem can be that I jump on ideas too quickly, I settle very quickly.

This was my sketching page I experimented with multiple different ways of folding the paper. I had an idea where I would have a square piece of paper and fold in the 4 corners, on the back It would say 4 reasons to volunteer, and each of the 4 corners would pull back to reveal a reason on an image. The full square would open up to have a full image on it. Now even though I thought that this would be an enticing and interesting concept. It wasn't very practical, for starters, the 4 corners wouldn't lie flat so stacking them would be difficult, also they corners kept coming open. Another method I came up with was throwing the standard leaflet concept on its head and flipping it horizontally just to mix things up. However, the idea I went with was folding an A4 piece of paper in half but not to the very bottom, having a section still visible to the reader. Now the possibilities are endless for this arrangement and it can work with lots of different leaflets and causes.

This was how the fold looked on a plain piece of paper, I really like the idea because it gave a nicely sized area where an enticing image or text could be placed onto it. Also, the orientation of the page is unusual, you don't often see a leaflet this shape. I had envisioned that on the bottom piece of paper there would be an image of a dirty garden and then when you fold back the paper it reveals a paradise and that patch of dirty garden is cleverly mixed into the paradise. However, I couldn't think of a creative way of mixing that into part of the paradise piece. So I decided to take inspiration from a recent leaflet I picked up from the National Trust.                    

The leaflet unfolded

I really liked the leaf design on the top of this leaflet, it is a nice effect and gives a nice background for white text to sit on. It also Is cheaper to print and will use less ink than having a huge image printed onto the leaflet. I found an image of some leaves and then cut around the bottom of them to give this exact same effect. This also gave me a nice platform to play around with the depth of the leaves and negative space. Firstly because the leaves have natural edges, then the when the text wasn't completely on top of the leaves they almost disappeared into the white background, and even though this happened you could still read the text. Also, I cut out part of the word paradise so that it appeared that the leaves were on top of the word. The bottom of the leaflet is what will be visible when the leaflet is folded. I used rose petals because it contrasts with the green leaves and is a bold

colour overall. Red is also the colour of the "We need you" stamp I wanted to use so it fits in with that as well. Continuing with the red contrast, I changed the word Paradise to a red gradient. A couple of things that I didn't like about my final design was firstly the text in the main body of the leaflet because I didn't have actual text to display on the leaflet and the whole exercise was based on folding paper and visualising ideas, I just chucked some text into the middle of it, for the real thing I would've gone into more detail with the layout. Also spacing wise the space between, 'Want' and the top of the paper is too small, also the spacing between all the header words are too far apart. So after I had finalised my piece I opened the pictures I took of my paper into photoshop. This allowed me to place my leaflet on top. I then adjusted the perspective of the leaflet and the colour so match with the lighting of the image and the colour of the paper. This was the final result!!