I was walking around Farnborough town centre when someone handed me a leaflet. People usually do one of two things with leaflets. 1 – they refuse to take it. Or 2 – they take it and throw it in the nearest bin. However, the leafleter was probably told not to return until all the leaflets were taken, so the least I could do was take one, right?
It was only when I got home that I realised that it was a gym leaflet advertising a membership I couldn’t see myself using. I was about to throw it away until I thought to myself – “How about I recreate the leaflet?”. I hadn’t done any DTP work for a while, so it was a good opportunity to brush up my skills.
My program of choice was LibreOffice’s Draw. I used it as even though it’s an open source program, it’s a pretty powerful piece of software, which is part of a suite of equally great programs. I set up an A5 canvas and began my work. It soon became apparent to me that I wouldn’t be able to create the background in Draw, so I switched to MyPaint and used one of the airbrushes from the Kaerhon Brush Pack v1.
I ended up creating 2 layers so that I could easily manage them individually, allowing me to lower the opacity of the lighter blue layer. To make sure I wasn’t creating too large an image (it’s easy to do with an infinite canvas size!), I used the frame tool to limit the image to 2687 x 2687 pixels. I kept the background white so that I could position it in Draw without having to extend the image to cover the whole page, which I found helpful later on.
I found a transparent image of a woman in gymwear through a simple Google Image search, which I found quickly through changing the search settings to suit my needs. I downloaded the Boxxed Flat Social Media Icon pack so I could use the Facebook and Twitter icons in my design.
The fonts I used (Free Avant Garde and Tiresias Signfont) were already installed on my computer, which I found were closest to the ones on the original leaflet. I positioned the model so that she was “resting” on the blue bubble, which I felt brought the various elements of the design together.
To recreate the logo, I changed the kerning of the text for “gym” so that the letters would be touching as they were in the original. I found that the same dark blue used for the blue bubble was the same in the logo, which meant all I had to do was copy the hex codes across each time I wanted to use that same colour.
What did I learn from this spontaneous exercise?
- It would have been easier to get the colours correct had I scanned the image instead of guessing by eye
- Using gridlines makes it easier to get different objects on the same line
- Adding a shadow below the model would have made her seem more realistic than having her float in the space
Download my version here
