The Swiss Booklet

The Swiss Booklet

My brief was to create a 32-page booklet, which interpreted the word “play”. I like the Swiss graphic design style and I wanted my booklet to have a Swiss feel to it. I chose to base the booklet around Switzerland and the activities that are on offer there, whilst involving the word play. The booklet is a Swiss travel booklet, which tells the viewer where to play in Switzerland with regards to what activities are on offer. I chose to use the word play as an instruction and direction as to where to play in Switzerland.

When I started off creating this booklet I was going use black and white imagery from Getty Images and create a red graphics overlay, but after much thought, I thought that it would look better creating everything myself. I starting by creating symbols for the word play and other activities that I wanted to put in the book.

The first symbol “Play” is an introduction symbol that introduces the viewer onto the four activities symbols. For each activity I created a symbol, one for Ski, Snowboard, Hike and Biking. In the beginning pages all the symbols are displayed under the symbol play, which shows what activities, are on offer. I created the characters with bigger heads then their bodies because I wanted them to be character like as well as symbol like. I didn’t want the symbols to look too formal. I wanted them to look fun and different.

I created the booklet first of all predominately using the colour red. After a few talks with people I decided that it would be better to introduce the colour blue with the red. I changed the tone of red that I was using and put it with a very light blue background. Designers Republic had done something similar in their choice of colours for their “buy me” poster campaign and it worked really well. The blue adds to the icy cold feel of the booklet and compliments the red, when the red is only used sparingly for headings and other graphics.

I created a graphic scene for each symbol across a spread.  For the skiing and snowboarding scenes I created very simple mountain graphics using the pen tool in illustrator. I then added some dot graphics to give the impression of snow. For all the scenes where I placed the symbols I just wanted simple graphics so it is obvious to the viewer. I am pleased with the overall look of the booklet and I am glad that I changed the colours, as I was not that convinced at first. The booklet has a simple feel to it and it is not complicated and that’s what I wanted to achieve.