Client:
Claro Cafe
Claro Cafe is an online coffee shop, coffe roasting center and specialised equipment reseller.
To promote themselves at an upcoming conference, we decided that the best course would be a flyer.
All of my work starts with either a sketch or moodboard, just to make sure I’m on the same page as the client visually. This is a good way to figure out the client’s expectations.
For Claro we agreed on a strong headline with a red/beije color scheme. We also decided that it would have icons to make it a bit fun.
Sometimes handeling the copy myself is refreshing because I get to play with certain ideas. If the first part was about the company I wanted to make the other side about the product.
I made the headlines cafea de specialitate, ambalata cu grija, la preturi accesibile (specialised coffee handled with care, at a fair price) work as headlines, but also as a individual sentence.
It’s worth noting that this is a material prospective clients will pick up on the showroom floor, after they’ve visited maybe another 10 stands, in other words they’re tired and need information fast and easy.
Enter this sentence to give them the info at a glance, plus the call to action: viziteaza-ne si convinge-te (visit us and see for yourself) followed by a QR to Claro’s site to make conversion that much easy.
My experience as a DTP always serves me well, because I can make accurate enough estimates of how much content can and should be fitted in a medium. That being said, the icons I mentioned earlier, weren’t going to happed, because it would overload the composition and kill the rhythm.
Still, I wanted to add a bit of character to the artwork. So I used the footer as a pretext to add a bit of decorative charm to it. There’s never a bad time to do illustration.
Initially I had the call to action: viziteaza-ne si convinge-te also on the banner with a double meaning. On the flyer it would mean visit us on the site, scan the code. And on the banner it would mean, visit us here now.
The main reason we wanted a strong headline was because the headline was also going to be used for the banner on the stand, it needed to stand out.
It didn’t make the cut because ultimately the URL and logo were much more important. The main headline cafea de specialitate is also a revision from the initial calitate pe gustul tau (quality to your taste) because we decided that the coffee’s characteristics is a much stronger selling point.
The product flyer was more intensive on the layouting and resource management side than anything else. The question was how do you create a layout to acomodate 21 products on a two side A4 and make it look good? The answer, math and a bit of precise content management. It was clear that I had to use the package shot for all the coffee if I wanted to have room for the copy.
The problem was that, these were new types of coffee that the client was just now bringing in stoc, that had no visual materials prepared for them beforehand.
This was just a minor setback, after all, the ideal scenario never happens, and for whatever reason or limitation you always need to act on your best professional judgement.
I chose to return to the initial idea of icons for the other two flyers. The first were a series of tests to see how the silouette would behave on smaller sizes as well as stacked. I wanted to make sure the sillouette is defined well enough, and is distinct enough to not cause confusion over the fact that the items in the bullets are different.
I wanted the coffee cup to be round enough that is resembles a bulletpoint to some extent, but not so round as to lose the idea of being a cup.
The point of the Horeca and product flyers was to have a more focused approach than a general presentation. Horeca is the prime example of this.
Using photostocks is always a harder task than commissioned photos, because the pitfall of having a generic representation no matter what you do is very real.
Luckily there are certain specific cases and visual segments where the visual’s character is so specific, that it doesn’t matter if you’re being a bit generic, since it’s within a specific representation anyway, so the amount of harm it can do is limited.
The last page of the horeca flyer was a interesting piece because I had the oportunity to mix and match eveything so far.
If had the product flyer’s bullets, it had it’s own tables and visuals, and it had the first flyer’s accents and footer.
It was, I believe, a very appropriate way of concluding the project.
