Dominican Republic Tourism Agency Mailer WIP
The mailer I will be designing will be featuring the work of Dominican graphic designer Laura Mariñez, and will serve as an invitation to a B Gallery exhibition of her work in Columbus, OH. It will follow the Dominican Republic Tourism Agency's brand guidelines and combine the bright and colorful aura of the Dominican Republic with Laura's elegant and sleek design work.
Here is a mood board I created of some of Laura's recent work that I will be including in the mailer
Here is a look at my Pinspiration for the design. I plan on focusing on Laura's floral pieces so I was drawn to some of these beautiful designs and their use of monotone color and floral graphics
Here are some of the possible die cut and layout sketches. For the die cut I wanted something unique to the brand and also features Laura or her work. I had started by using the cactus flower graphic and the faceless doll logo for the tourism agency. After receiving the images of her work, I decided that I wanted to use her Nature piece as the die cut focus. The area around the eye that is surrounded by flowers would serve as a beautiful die cut on the cover of the mailer
Here is a more refined rough of the design. I'm still adjusting the interior design and laying it out in a unique and creative way. Instead of saying "You Are Invited" on the cover, it will have her name and the date of the exhibition like the sketch above.
Here is the physical mockup of my chosen layout design. The inside pages are not completely fleshed out yet but you are able to see how the die cut interacts with the artwork on the inside.
I printed a larger version with the actual die cut and imagery to see how it would interact. Seeing the physical copy of what I was working on made it much easier to spot errors in my design and get a feel for the scale of text and images.
Since my die cut is pretty complex, I wanted to make sure that it would match up perfectly with the image on the inside. After printing out the version above and noticing that it was slightly off, I returned to InDesign to fix it. I used small measurement boxes, similar to the ones we used for the BRM, and placed them on both pages. I test printed this and cut out the die cut about 8 times before I finally got it perfect.
I wanted my RSVP to be relatively simple. I had trouble finding a good place to put the picture of Laura so I tried it on the RSVP to see how it would look. I eventually found a better spot to put the image and removed it, simplifying the overall design. I added the squiggly rule belows to echo the floral graphic elements in my brand guidelines and to make it a little more fun.
The part I struggled the most with was placing the text on the inside of the mailer as well as incorporating examples of Laura's work and maneuvering around the die cut. I had first broke up the bio and put some on the outside along with her picture as intro to the rest of the bio but then it didn't leave me enough type to work with on the inside.
