Anyone familiar with the powerhouse team behind Pinkeye Graphics knows that far from having a ‘just stepped out of the salon‘ look, we appear to have never even stepped IN across the threshold. As of a couple of weeks ago (for one of us at least) that was probably true – until we were invited by Level Hair and Beauty in our home town of Ryde to produce some publications.
Before (left) and after: price list and appointment card
Chatting with salon owner Genevieve, we soon learned that we were had a pretty short deadline on our hands. Fortunately, the majority of the information we needed to produce the printed material was available in Word format so we didn’t have to type it all up. We were given a palette of colours (black, white and silver) with which to work. We also had access to some fabulous pictures produced by the salon’s product partner Label.M, which were a great resource. The images from Label.M were only available in screen-resolution (72dpi) as part of a multi-page pdf. We extracted the pictures from the document and, using our pen and refine edge tools, carefully cut round the models and their exciting coiffures.
We created several paragraph styles, including one which used the skills we’ve honed doing tables of contents with dot leaders. This forced all of the prices to line up at the right margin. We had to create two versions of this style; one for full width (one column) prices and one for a two column split.
Alas none of the logos that we were asked to include in the publicity materials were provided in vector format. Some of the jpgs we were given would have been ok but, being vector nerds, we set about finding the definitive versions using the awesome power of Brands of the World. Those we couldn’t find on BOTW we extracted from pdfs we found online and cleaned them up in Illustrator. We also made a new Level logo by modifying the existing Label.M logo (with their consent).
Fortunately the client only suggested a few minor changes to the first draft of the artwork – altering some of the prices and adding a couple of extra lines. For accessibility reasons we were keen not to reduce the font size so, with a bit of tweaking to the leading and paragraph spacing we made sufficient room on the page for the extra data. We took the design through to other items including appointment cards and Twitter livery.
The print work was delivered in time for the salon’s relaunch ten days after we were given the brief.
