Olyarts  |  Visual Design + Branding

PROJECT OVERVIEW

OlyArts is a newspaper publishing organization centered around spreading awareness of the arts community in Olympia. The team had rough content ready for their first issue but needed help executing the layout, making sure that content fit the pages appropriately, and translating the brand voice into a visual style guide.

olyarts.org

TASKS 

  • Work with organization owners to build a visual style guide that adheres to brand voice, and master template. Logo and brand study provided by publishers.

  • Design debut issue for OlyArts - 16 pages, 8,000 copies + 4,000 extra of a truncated version for co-distribution in another publisher.

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Planning the Spread

One of the challenges was understanding how the content would fit into a 16-pager layout. To gain a holistic understanding of order of content, I worked with the publisher to structure the content onto pages and to foresee and address any gaps identified in the process of this exercise. This exercise also helped the publisher start to visualize the spread and have a plan to drive execution moving forward.

 
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Wireframes and blocking content

To further the plan for execution, I started playing around with different blockings of content to give the publisher some ideas of information hierarchy. Some questions to consider were:

  • What is the purpose of the newspaper issue?

  • What is the most important content to highlight?

  • What message do we want to send to readers?

  • What content do we want readers to focus on?

Thinking about the visual hierarchy of this issue also helped us start thinking about how to scale the layouts for future issues. By thinking further ahead, we were able to agree on a template layout that would be flexible for different content to be displayed.