Design stationery that’s almost a brochure: Picture your product, not your logo

- HI everybody. John McWade, Senior Author here at Lynda.com. What I'm looking at today is a very intriguing set of stationery. Instead of a conventional logo on their letterhead, envelope, and business card, Dean and Thomas Architecture pictures three of their projects. How different this is. What I like about it is that one, it looks great. And two, it telegraphs at a glance, before you read a word, the kind of projects they do, the quality of their work, and sort of the general vibe of the firm. The look is super clean, almost minimal. Very angular, very architectural. So I'd like to deconstruct it, and show you what they've done and how they've done it, and I hope get across that this is something you can do on your own projects too. Lets start with the type. Photos are the showy part, but type is actually the anchor for the whole piece. They've chosen Helvitca Neue for their name and Helvetica Neue Extended for Architecture. All uppercase, which projects a strong rectangular look. Mechanical, very built, very architectural. Lowercase wouldn't do that. Round letters are softer, more informal. They have ascenders. Very different feel. The name is big. Architecture is smaller without being small, and it's shaded 10% lighter gray. The default spacing leaves the construction like this. You may see this as a stair-step, you may see it as a curve. And either way, it's not ideal. A bit top heavy, a bit unfinished. What we want is to widen the letter spacing like this. This does several things. It adds a lot of air to the setting, which lightens it. It creates a sense of panorama, or grandeur. When you see monumental lettering, like on the side of a building carved in stone, it's always uppercase and it's always widely spaced. There's a power in that. In this case it also squares the ends. It widens the base. It's now very mechanical, very built. Keep this in mind when you have monumental objects and ideas, that you need to represent. Anyway, the last piece is the focal point. And that's the orange plus sign. And because it's the focal point, it needed to be centered carefully between those two words. The default spacing has the plus too far to the left. The adjustment has to be made by eye, because the N of Dean and the T of Thomas are quite different. The N has a straight vertical stroke and the T has a crossbar. Its vertical is farther over. And because of this you ignore most but not all of the crossbar. It has very little presence relative to the verticals. So now just center it in that area. Best thing to do is probably squint at it. And there you go. That's the setting. This is their logo. I like this. It's understated. It's handsome. And it's easy to do. Let's look at the pictures. They've put their photos into vertical rectangles, all the same size. Rectangles are perfect with their Architecture. If you're doing florals, you wouldn't want rectangles. You'd need a more organic approach. But that's another story. The photo goes directly above the block of type, sized to the exact width. The space between the photo and the logotype is the same as the space between the two lines of the logo. This is repetitive construction. And it sustains that built, mechanical theme. This establishes the visual relationship between the photos and type, and keeps it consistent. What you don't want is to have your words here on one piece, farther away on another, bigger or smaller or off to the right, and so on. You build this one relationship and then you sustain it. Now let's look at layout. This approach is going to look good everywhere. Brochures, signage, web, mobile devices. But what I like about stationery, you've heard me say this before, is that letterhead, envelope, and business card are quite different. Different sizes, different proportions, different functions, and yet they all need to look alike. Ideally, this is not always possible but as ideal, you want your material to be the same physical size on all three pieces. The business card will typically be the determiner of that because it's so small, but not always. What Dean and Thomas did was place the photo against the top edge of the page. All the way. Just bleed it. What this does is create the cleanest possible line, which mimics the look of their designs. If you bring the picture down and leave a gap, it becomes a frame. And because our eye follows that line around, it's slow and heavy. Where the pictures are sleek. You know, it's a different look. So, no gap. Now, bleed to the left edge then move back to the right, 1/2 the width of the photo. This is what we call a rational distance. It's one half of a nearby dominant object. That's an easy measure for your eye to process. Now we can set the contact information. This is also in Helvetiva Neue Light. 10 point type on 14.5 point spacing. It's colored 50% gray, so it recedes like the name and it's aligned to the right. How far below the logo should it go? They've again used a rational distance. It's the same as the space between the Architecture baseline in the photo, the nearby dominant object. It's harder to see because it's type. It's not a hard edge. So you have some room to play with. As it is, the white gap is a pause. You see the image and logo, pause, then the copy. They're separate elements but they're connected by proximity and there's a gracefulness to this. You could push them closer, like the same as the distance between, we'll call these paragraphs, which is also a rational distance. And it looks fine. Different, but fine. The type is aligned to the right, because if it were aligned to the left it would create a heavy white column on the left. Kind of like that frame we just saw. That's a distraction. We don't want that. Keep your eyes open for spaces that form inadvertently, like this. Aligned right is also a less common setting, and in this case, kind of elegant. And that's the look. Now repeat it exactly on the envelope but with a different photo. Again, bleed to the top, 1/2 the photo width from the left, everything the same, except the copy. Envelopes generally have only a physical street address. Keep the gap between the logotype and the address the same. When you get to the business card and position the photo 1/2 its width from the left like this, it actually centers it on the card. It's just a coincidence in this case and it looks nice, but the problem is that it looks different. The look they've made is offset to the left. So what they did to sustain that is move everything over to 1/3 the width. It's a bit arbitrary. You're not going to see 1/3. But it's reasonable. And it works. The business card now feels like everything else. So that's the project. Very cool idea. It's really a good look. And you're not limited to three images. You could have MOO.com print up a card deck where every card has a different picture on it. Remember though to maintain that consistency. And that's your design for today. See you next time.