Creating the branding and brochure for the made-up Crystal Waters Spa was my major project for Print and Production class. The idea behind the spa itself comes from the belief that crystals have healing properties.
I needed to take consideration of some details regarding material and embellishments for the brochure that I had never encountered before. While I was familiar with the process of creating branding from the ground up, taking the materials through to print with these kinds of details was a great learning experience.
For the logo, I went with a very light, feminine style, to reflect the nature of the business. The symbolmark features a simple, shining crystal, half full of water, in soft pink and blue colour.
You can see here all the concepts I went through before settling on this logo. I knew I wanted to mix the water and crystal motifs somehow, but I started out with intricate designs and eventually settled with something a bit more minimalist.
This project required a business card, letterhead, and envelope. I used a simple image and plenty of white space to make a clean, modern design. This was one of the first times I attempted to design something minimalist, and it was a bit challenging to find a happy medium between lacking elements and too much complexity.
A type of embellishment and a diecut was required on the brochure, properly executed in Adobe Illustrator using spot colours, so that a print shop would be able to print them and apply the embellishments. In addition, I needed to specify the weight of the cover and inside paper. I applied a spot gloss on the logo's symbolmark, and the die cut is a window on the cover revealing an image inside.
Sending the brochure to the print shop and doing a bit of arts and crafts to bring it fully to life was really fun. The logo's spot gloss embellishment was created by carefully cutting out clear stickers and delicately placing the pieces over top. Cutting out the window for the diecut was very difficult because of the thick paper stock, but it paid off being able to see the image of water through it.
This project taught me a lot about designing for print with proper embellishment setup. For future projects, I'll be aware of and able to identify the necessary steps to creating really unique print collateral.
