The Young Women Leaders Program is a UCF sponsored Big Sister/Little Sister mentorship between UCF women and middle school girls nominated by their teachers. While the YWLP program has their own website where they control most of their operations, they do not have any print works to easily distribute to people who want to learn more about the program at a glance. This predicament sets the premise for the print booklet project assigned by my Intermediate Graphic Design II professor.
The Project
Using the images and textual content provided by the website and the program director, I had to design a booklet for the YWLP program that is no smaller than 8.5 by 11 and no larger than 11 x 17. The booklet must contain all important information from the website including the logo, contact information, and of course, images from past YWLP sessions. The book had to be laid out using a consistent color scheme that appropriately represents the program and all elements must be laid out in a clean and easy-to-read format.
The front cover with YWLP logo. Logo was redesigned in Illustrator and imported into InDesign.
First spread: pages 1 and 2. Introduces the program.
Second spread: pages 3 and 4. Explains the roles of Big Sisters and how to become one.
Third spread: pages 5 and 6. Discusses activities Little Sisters can participate in.
Fourth spread: pages 7 and 8. A frequently asked question spread to inform parents about the program.
Fifth spread: pages 9 and 10. A spread that informs the reader how they can help support the program.
Back page – contact information.
Color Scheme
The program caters to just women so I wanted to choose a soft color palette. It needed a flair of femininity, however, I didn’t want to go the obvious route by choosing “Barbie” colors like pink and purple. It’s a leadership program for young women after all; the design must be mature.
This palette is inspired by the ocean. The warm gray is similar to wet sand, the bone white is similar to dry sand, the light blue and indigo colors suggest water, and the coral looks like … coral. These colors give the book a calm but firm appearance, much like what you’d expect an effective leader to be.
The bone white was used as a background color. I wanted to get away from using the usual “white” for this project. The warm gray was used as an accent, particularly for strokes around objects. The lighter blue was used for the front page, contact page, and for visual elements, such as the striped bar at the bottom of the pages and for the page numbers where white circles were used. The indigo blue was for the body text. The coral was for headings.
Typefaces
The original logo used a slab-serif font which is (or looks exactly like) Chunk Five. When I recreated the logo in Illustrator, I used Chunk Five to mimic the original logo and just made some adjustments to balance the letters inside the circle. The letters surrounding the logo was an all-caps sans serif which I was unable to identify. I instead used DINpro in its place.
On the actual booklet, I used Chunk Five for the headings to tie the design back to the logo. This helped establish unity between the booklet and YWLP’s identity. For the body text, I used the serif-font Caecilia for better readability, and again, to establish a more gentle, feminine appearance. Caecilia is larger than most typical serif fonts like Times New Roman, so I had to bump it down to 10 pt to add more contrast between the size of the headings and the size of the body text.
Imagery
The last topic I want to cover is my use of imagery. Parents are one of the major target audiences this book is designed for. I avoided illustrations and opted for photographs of the Big Sisters/Little Sisters participating in the program. Parents want to see their children being featured in publications to feel a sense of pride and continue to be involved with the success of the program. Framing these photos strategically and making the text wrap around them also allows for the information to flow in a more interesting way. Nobody wants to read a booklet that’s just blocks of text after all.
Hope you guys enjoyed this project as much as I did. I’m excited to present it. As always, critiques and feedback is always welcome. Don’t forget to follow my blog for more!