Leaflet 'Wrap Up'

After all of the hassle trying to get certain pictures, fonts, layouts for our flyer/leaflet, MJM Productions has finally come to the point where we almost 'wrap up' creating and editing the leaflet. I could not wait for this day to come. Also, Matiss and I were making final additions and changes to the flyer. I was doing the back of the flyer, I will talk about this later in this post. James was doing the presentation.

In the beginning of the session, I quickly reminded my group to fill in the font gaps with yellow because in James's design, the font was pink and yellow. If I forgot to remind them, the font would not be the same, it would just look...pink. Yellow is a 'crazy' colour, however, it attracts customers. So, if we apply yellow to our font, customers would be interested in reading it. We included the yellow in the text by using the bucket tool which allowed us to fill in gaps with a certain colour. You can see this on the image on the left. Unfortunately, this took us most of our time because there were tiny spaces and they are extremely difficult to fill.

Thinking that we have completed the front of the leaflet, we printed it out. As I looked at the design, it did not look that special. I thought it was too brief. In that case, I asked Mr Hind about what we should change. He said that I should take the printed copy and go round classes and see what they think of the leaflet. I chose to do that so I decided to go to the art room next door to the photography room. The students were a mix of children aged 11-12 and teenagers as well. This is good because teenagers and children are our target audience. A couple of children and teenagers said that the front is brief. One girl also told me that the bottom of the leaflet is boring and needs a little bit of tweaking. Another teenager said that it should be more relaxed and should match with the steam. I took all of these ideas on board and I told these to my group. I decided to change the slogan. In my idea, it said 'fresh and hot' so I said that to the group. Although we wanted to change the slogan, we were thinking to merge the two together. The image on the right shows you that we made slight changes (the slogan has changed, there is an added boarder, Shakin' Moo's mascot and 2nd slogan are tilted and made slightly bigger).

Whilst that was done, I was continuing with the back of the leaflet. I came up with an outstanding idea of making the Shakin' Moo's map by getting a map where Shakin' Moo's is on Google Maps. I copied the image onto paint and selected the bits I wanted. Then, I dragged the map onto a Shakin' Moo's logo boarder which I made earlier by erasing the logo words. The map automatically cropped itself in the shape of the Shakin' Moo's boarder when I selected and deselected some layers. Finally, it looked like a proper Shakin' Moo's map! Matiss helped me by installing the font as I was using a different computer without the font. Also, he added and arrow which I could not find. I included the 'free wi fi' logo as previous Shakin' Moo's flyers had these. Here it what it looks like:

Meanwhile, James was doing the presentation for presenting our product to Chris Lane. He was stuck of a few things to write. Fortunately, I helped him.

Our targets for next week is not to rush anything because when I showed our 'draft' product to the children and teenagers, they thought it was rushed as well, so in conclusion we need to realise that its about quality not quantity.

Next week, we will be advertising the flyer to Chris Lane with our presentation to help us. We will be practicing our presentation mostly next session.

Hi Michael

Some really strong comments with good illustration. Very well done.

Ninth Session: Photoshop

In today's session, we realised that we were almost finished with our final leaflet. All there is to it is to add the Shakin' Moo's font to the final flyer and then we would be pretty much done. Plus, we needed to tweak our final design as it still had crop marks, lasso and magnetic lasso marks (the marks are white leftovers from cropping). All we needed to do with these is just to rub them out. We used the blur tool for this on Adobe Photoshop. Here are the images before and after:

Unfortunately, you cannot see the change clear enough because the change we done was very minimal. What I can tell you is that the edges of the cup are smoother and sharper after and previously it was a little bit jagged. We used the blur tool for this. However, it seems simple but it is not. You will need to zoom into the image from 150%-200%. This is because it is very difficult to clear the extra lines and leftovers from far away and normal image size. Also, you need to be careful using the blur tool because if you make a mistake, it just might erase some of the cup. Here is another example that will be clearer to see:

As you can see, the image before has quite a lot of extra white bits, mainly in the corners (between the legs and arms). Again, to solve this we used the blur tool again. It was really difficult to do the corners because one little slip can erase more than the corner. Eventually, the image has no excess white bits left. There is no problem to leave a little white behind as it could give the image a glow.

Meanwhile, the IT came to unlock the control panel because of the administrator blocking us to install the font for our leaflet. Plus, he helped us install the font so we were able to use it. Whilst the IT guy was installing the font, I said to make the Shakin' Moo's mascot smaller because the font needs to be big. So, we made the mascot smaller (left picture) in order to do that. When the font was ready, we wasted no time getting the font onto the flyer because we had to wait so long. Here is the flyer with the text on:

Already it looks more appealing. Matiss and James thought we did not need to do anything else with the font. I had an idea. I said to add yellow to the font as on the draft, it had yellow on the blank bits. I thought that these would make it even more appealing. My group members agreed. Unfortunately, we did not have time to do because the IT guy took ages to download the font...

I had an idea to create the location services on the back of the flyer. My group agreed with this as well. I will talk about this more the next three weeks because we have got half term and no CRAM Media on next week.

I do not think we needed any targets this week as we have done not that much to our flyer because of the IT guy coming in extremely late. We could of finished the flyer if he came in on time!

Next three weeks, we will be improving the flyer as well as the font. I will continue with the location services and talk more about them. I may show you some pictures on my blog.

Hi Michael

Excellent blogging again - well done! Yo are including lots of detail and illustrating you comments effectively.