Recreation Guy

I see a lot of parks and recreation department and YMCA brochures. Most of them have one thing in common, the cover is not as engaging as it could be. I would show you examples but I don’t want anyone getting offended. Just take a look at yours or the city recreation departments and YMCAs in your area.

For the last year I have been chomping at the bit to design our brochure. I knew that the woman who was doing it at the time was getting tired of putting it together and working with the tight deadlines. I am creative in nature, whether it’s camp programs, special events or after school flyers. It’s the details that I’m not very good at. So it was important that we had some good proof readers once I took over the brochure, which I did in January of this year, 2009.

I’m not going to cover the inside pages since many of the times that is a flow issue. If the flow is not good in an activity guide it can mess up everything, but that is beyond the scope of this post. I want to discuss the cover.

When I took over the design of the brochure/activity guide I wanted the cover to grab the attention of prospective readers. So I wanted it to look like a magazine. The job of a magazine graphic designer is to get people to pick up the magazine, so they know how to grab the customer’s attention. I also wanted people to know about our new programs and events and where exactly to find them in the guide. With that, I went to the bookstore.

I picked up 6 magazines that I really liked and felt popped out at me. Once I got back to the office I chose one layout that appealed to me the most. That was the HDProVideo magazine you see here. I really liked the size of the title as well as the pictures on the right of the cover that teases the reader about whats inside of the magazine.

The next thing I needed to do was choose a picture. Since I wanted to promote our new classes I decided that I would use a picture of a dog in order to promote our new dog training program. Since the pictures we had were not quite the quality I was looking for I went to my favorite stockphoto site Dreamstime. The great thing about Dreamstime is that the photos are so inexpensive – and most of them are great quality. After browsing for 15 minutes I found the picture I wanted to use.

Now it was time to make the cover. This took some playing around with different fonts and placement until I liked what I saw. Using colors was important as well. The picture I was going to use had some blue, brown/yellowish, black and white. The smaller pictures I wanted to use had more colors but I didn’t necessarily want to use those colors unless the text was near it.

Look, I’m not a graphic designer. I’ve never taken design classes (though I had thought about going in that direction) and I taught myself how to use Adobe InDesign by watching the video tutorials on a killer website called Lynda.com. I pretty much went with my gut and knew that I had a decent eye for design. From there I found what I liked in another magazine and voila.

One woman came into our office after she had seen the guide and told the director how she never opens the recreation guide, she just throws it away. Because this one looked like a magazine she opened it, not really knowing what it was, and saw all the great adult classes we offered. She had no idea that these classes were available through us. She enrolled in a couple of them. That was the biggest compliment I could have gotten. So here was the end result.

To see the cover I did, with the help of Everyday with Rachel Ray magazine take a look at my summer camp site SummerCampProgramDirector.com.