One-color Recruitment Notepad Project

The assignment was to create a promotional notepad for Pitt State to use in the recruitment process which would target high school aged kids. I began to ponder on the days of old, and the things that I did while in high school. I was immediately reminded of looking through old notebooks from classes in high school in which I had several doodles scattered throughout. This thought sparked an idea for my design as I began to brainstorm.

Word Matrix during the brainstorming process

After the brainstorming process, I managed to come back to the theme that had originally came to mind, doodles. I began sketching several layouts as thumbnails and how I wanted my layout to appear. This really helped my design by allowing me to decide how to lay my content out, although what I thought looked good in my sketches ended up changing again during the design process. Below are pictures of my thumbnails and roughs that were used to jump start my design process.

 Thumbnail sketches

 Rough sketches

I began to start laying out my designs relative to the layout I figured that would look and work the best that it could. With having many layouts narrowed down to what I had visioned, I could then concentrate on putting my idea down on the screen. I knew I wanted my Illustrator file of the crosshatch sketch to bleed off of the pad itself, so I created my files according to the bleed. I then placed my image, and began adding aditional elements in illustrator.  Once I was happy with the look of my notepad, I placed the file into my InDesign file. My InDesign file was constructed to the proper 1/8 of an inch bleed which allowed for my Illustrator file to be placed at 100 percent. I then added a web address in InDesign and my design was complete.

 Finished PDF with crop marks and colorbars