Specs Howard Brochure...

In my CM541 class, we were asked to find a sign or brochure and rate it on whether it is good, useable information or poorly designed. Today, while flipping through the myriad of junk mail on my teacher's desk I ran across one piece of mail that was, well, shall we say junkier than the rest? It was a brochure inviting me and an interested student to attend a breakfast, panel discussion and tour of Specs Howard School of Broadcasting Arts in Southfield Michigan.

I found the brochure to be poorly designed in every way imaginable...it lacked the necessary Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity to organize information and present it in a way that was both pleasing to the eye and easy to find information at a glance. Instead it was crap!

First, let's look at the cover to the right. The use of flowered images has nothing to do with radio or tv broadcasting..it is there to fill space...Unless it is there to tell me I should expect those flowers on my breakfast table when I arrive, maybe? The use of colored rainbow lines of various thickness was annoying to the eye. Finally, the title is unoriginal...Breakfast for Champions...is this perhaps suggestive of Wheaties for breakfast?

The inside of the brochure was even worse. The only repetition was the annoying rainbow lines of color that hurt my eyes. Information was all over the place in long and short white columns, that looked like post-it notes strewn haphazardly across the page. Information in each column was aligned left, but the worse example of alignment is in the thin white column to the far right. Words are centered and justified, making some of the letters of words spread too far apart..An example is the word "be." I think that proximity and alignment could have been used to organize information better, and that contrast in type could have been used for interest better than the rainbow lines running across the page. I do not understand why the words "The Menu", got more emphasis than the actual name of the school...If they had meant the brochure to read like a menu inside, they should have had it set up like one...using alignment, and bold letters to title each part of the day's activities...Breakfast could have been the appetizer section...the panel discussion, the entrees, and the tour the dessert...All in all, this brochure came across to me, an educator, as amateurish. It did not create interest for me to want to take students interested in radio and television to the breakfast or the school.