From the course: Graphic Design Tips & Tricks
How to transfer your look to a new format
From the course: Graphic Design Tips & Tricks
How to transfer your look to a new format
- Hey, everybody, John McWade, senior author here at lynda.com. Today I'd like to talk about what I consider to be a critical design skill, and that's the ability to take a design, or take a look that you've created in one place and transfer it to another place. You may have created something for print, that then needs to be transferred to the web or a brochure that needs to be transferred to a poster, or just a brochure that needs to be transferred from the outside to the inside. And by transfer I mean, repeat the look that you've created. You know, sometimes you just come up with a beautiful thing, the messaging, and the copy, and the images, and the layout all just click, and you look at it and you go, "Wow, that's gorgeous!" And your client looks at it and goes, "Wow, that's gorgeous! "Let's make everything look like that." And if your silent response to that is, "Uh-oh," that's a clue that you haven't really understood what it is you've done. You've just lucked out. So, I'd like to talk for a little bit or show you what it takes to transfer a look. So, I have here the cover of a brochure called Healthy Living, it's for a local hospital. I just made it up for purposes of this illustration. And we have a young, pretty, healthy, girl eating her salad, you know, a little bit of copy, the colors from that copy are derived from the salad, and so on. And we just want to move that to the inside. And what makes this challenging is that the inside has a different format, it's a different size, we'll have entirely different copy on the inside, we'll have a different photo on the inside. And so, it's how do you duplicate the look? So the place to start is by taking an inventory of what you already have. And, like I said, this starts with this young model, she's pretty, she's healthy, she's making eye contact, she's smiling at us. We have copy, the type here is set in myriad pro light. It's a great typeface for this kind of thing, very open, very fresh, projects a feeling of health and cleanliness. The color is a bright salad green, or a kind of a lime green, Popsicle green, the subhead is set in the same myriad pro light type, but gray, so it recedes a bit. Those are the obvious things. The colors are derived from the picture. And these are the colors that are in the picture, or the basic colors that are in the picture, they're not, however, in the proportions that you see them in the picture. In the picture we see a very little bit of red, even though red is almost the focal point. And a lot of white, a lot of flesh tone. What's harder to see is that this picture is sort of photographed in open space. It's not confined to this cover, but she's been photographed against a predominately white background that just sort of fades off into infinity. And it's very open, very fresh, very free flowing. You know, her shape is an organic shape that just kind of moves off into all directions. So when we add our copy to this, you can see that the only reason the picture is cropped the way it is is because we've encountered the limits of our sheet of paper. But your eye kind of filters that out. And the impression you have is that she is in a much bigger, more open space. And so, that's what we want to capture. That feeling is what we want to capture on the inside. When you're thinking about how to go about this, you know, after you've stared at this page for maybe a half an hour, your first temptation might be to just draw a border around it. You might not do this, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen this done. And I think this is probably an effort to contain the problem, you know, to make it smaller. You don't have this infinity of what do I do and where do I go, and how do I even start. It's sort of the visual equivalent of saying, "Um." And it would be fine, but the problem is when you draw a rectangle, you create more rectangles, you know, you now have a black rectangle, you have a white rectangle inside the black rectangle, you have straight edges, hard lines, sharp corners, and what it does is make you realize that this is a rectangular space. It's a finite space. And you had no sense of that before when it was empty, it was just open space. You know, the confined space is very different from the look of our cover model. And even if you pick up a color from the cover, which is a good thing to do, and bring it over, it helps because it lowers the contrast, but there's still a rectangle that confines the space. And you begin creating something that looks and feels different from the cover. So, don't do that. We place our photo on the spread, and this picture is a good one. It has a lot in common with the cover. He's young, he's good looking, he's healthy, he's smiling, he's making eye contact, but he's in a rectangular frame. And so no matter where on the spread you put this photo, it creates a rectangle, and whenever you create a rectangle, you create another shape in the negative space. And so now you have these two funky shapes. And if you leave it like this, you need to design to those rectangles. Rectangles are very different from the feeling of the front. And it doesn't matter where you put the picture. If you put it over here on the left, and you get these two funky shapes that have nothing in common with our cover model. And even if you enlarge this picture, and just fill one whole page with it, which is really a logical thing to do, you've still created a sharp, vertical division. And the inside now has a white page and a dark page that themselves feel different from the cover. The only way we could make this picture work is if we crop our model out of his background. And now he has a nice organic shape that mimics hers. And we're off to a good start. But I don't want to show you this picture, I would rather show you this one. This is the same model, and he has all the same qualities. You know, he's smiling, he's making eye contact, he's fit. He has now, you know, a nice organic edge around him, like she does. And he's feeling more like the front. Now add the copy. To do the copy, the headline is in the same typeface and basically the same size as on the front, same color, bring those elements over. The lead paragraph is the same myriad pro light, same as the cover, colored gray so it recedes a little bit. The right edge has kind of a ragged line to it, which is a good thing, that's very natural, very organic feeling. And now we're starting to get a good look on the inside that feels a lot like the outside, in type, in color, with the model, and with the open white space. You may be tempted as you work to make this headline bold. Not that you will, but it's an easy temptation. And the bold looks good. The reason we do things like this is because we tend to work on the spread in isolation. We're sort of making the spread itself look good, and we kind of lose contact with the front. But what happens when you make it bold is one, it's a different kind of thing than the cover, there's nothing like it on the cover. It would be worse, I think, if we were making a different typeface, but even a heavier version of the same typeface is foreign to the cover. And what you also do, because this type is now bold, it creates a much stronger horizontal line that wasn't there before, and you don't want that. Another thing you don't want to do is add a panel to the page, a color behind the model. The good thing about this panel is that it's colored green, so we've picked up that color from the cover, but you can tell that a huge amount of green looks very different from a small amount of green. But the real problem here is now the page has two basic zones on it. It has a green area and it has a white area divided by a sharp horizontal edge. And that's a very different feel from the cover, too. This would be a perfectly fine design some other place, some other time, but not here. And it doesn't matter what color we make that panel, we turn it yellow to pick up the color of the squash in her salad. You know, it lightens it, so the contrast isn't so great. But still it's two panels. The blue is the color of her jeans. The other thing when we add a panel like this and the horizontal edge that accompanies it, is that when we add that line, we automatically get another line right here, that wasn't there before. And with that line there, the headline becomes more obvious, and we can also see this line and this line. None of those lines were there before. None of those stripes were there before. And just by adding that panel, we've now created stripes. And stripes have nothing to do with the cover. It's a different form factor. So you don't want to go to any of those places. So let's take all of those away and get back to where we were to this light, open, free-flowing look that we have. And it would be great if we could stop right here, but we have a lot more copy to add, so we'll do that in three columns which are the natural break points for this text. They have a nice ragged, right organic edge and feel. And now the inside of this brochure has a great deal in common with the cover: the type, the colors, the model, the openness of it. But there's two more things. It is different from the cover in color. The cover is a lot more colorful than the inside. Because he's wearing black, and our type is green and gray, basically the inside of this is black, white, green and gray. And so we want to bring some of the cover color to the inside. And to do that, we'll pick up some of the blue that she's wearing, and brighten it a bit on the inside. There's so little blue that we're bringing in that brightening it will actually make it look bright to color those heads. The final step will be to bring from the outside to the inside those red cherry tomatoes, which have the same role on the inside as they had on the outside, and they are a focal point. And so now we have an inside made up of entirely different material than the outside that has a very similar look and feel to the outside. It's not like when you open this brochure you've landed in some foreign place. But you're in the same place and there's just a flow from one to the next. I think the only thing more that we can do to make this more like the cover is to Photoshop some of those distant curtains from behind our cover model and put them behind our guy. If we go back to the first photo of the guy and put him in, this works, too. But there are two reasons I chose not to do this. The two models are starting to look like too much of the same thing. They're both wearing blue, and they're both predominantly vertical. So we're kind of copying the cover, which we don't want. Instead we want to complement it and just pick up the feel, which we've done with this version. So, that's how you do it. You start by taking inventory of the things you've designed: your colors, your typography, your images, and you look particularly for the abstract qualities that you may overlook. In this case it's like the lightness and the airiness of our cover model. And don't introduce foreign elements into the design, even inadvertently. And that's your design for today. We'll cover this topic again, it is a critical design skill.
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Contents
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Design a modern cover: Think simple, clean, and angular3m 22s
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Transform a product sheet: Put your words here, not there3m 1s
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Design a business card: Make it look like what it says4m 40s
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Double your artwork for free: Use the same picture twice3m 49s
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Design a ghosted logo: A picture always goes with itself5m 39s
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Design a business card using repetitive shape4m 38s
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Why round letters are bigger than straight ones1m 49s
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Design a powerful poster: Work with your photo, not against it7m 13s
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Design stationery that’s almost a brochure: Picture your product, not your logo7m 42s
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Alignment: Your ruler’s good only for regular things4m 32s
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Logo design: Think simple3m 40s
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Your design needs a focal point: Dramatic photo anchors a strong makeover8m 5s
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Chart your data with images2m 26s
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Make a beautiful logo with off-the-shelf type3m 30s
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How to transfer your look to a new format13m 55s
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Angles4m 52s
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The (very!) versatile art of the silhouette8m 14s
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Easy, functional one-line design6m 30s
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Signage: Consistency makes the brand7m 59s
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Elementals: How black, white, and gray make depth2m 43s
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A beautiful desk calendar you can make yourself9m 28s
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Lesson of the counterintuitive logo5m 24s
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How to design visual instructions5m 42s
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Design a beautiful CD package9m 7s
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Simple brochure presents your face to the public2m 37s
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Soften the edge2m 49s
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Small layout packs a big punch6m 59s
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Shape it: Part one6m 52s
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Shape it: Part two4m
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A logo makeover: Part one5m 3s
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A logo makeover: Part two5m 22s
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Grid collage3m 8s
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People in a group on a grid5m 24s
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Magazine cover redesign4m 33s
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Designing cards with type alone7m 7s
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Designing a small-space advertisement4m 11s
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Designing a business card for a photographer5m 17s
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Designing names with type and basic shapes4m 17s
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Review of an outdoor sign logo7m 58s
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Creating a small multipage brochure9m 21s
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Designing with black, white, and gray5m 19s
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Gestalt techniques: Isomorphism6m 40s
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Redesigning a business card7m 48s
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How to put motion on a static page11m 59s
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The color wheel6m 36s
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Layout decision points5m 3s
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Designing a tiny brochure3m 53s
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Panoramic spacing3m 23s
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Multi-use format for a business card7m 57s
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The boring book cover challenge: Part 17m 31s
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The boring book cover challenge: Part 24m 21s
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The single space practice5m 1s
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Incorporating hairlines into your design4m 22s
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Close enough with color choice4m 39s
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More design techniques with grids4m 35s
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Lanzarote calendar assignment4m 11s
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Foreground focal point2m 58s
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Stop, look, observe3m 50s
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Working with a rule of thumb (dynamic) grid8m 24s
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The humble power of negative space9m 37s
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Go with the flow9m 52s
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Learning by doing11m 43s
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For the love of design!4m 7s
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The boring book cover challenge, part 35m 50s
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Bold moves5m 6s
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Simply beautiful4m 51s
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Common but versatile looks5m 37s
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Audacious philanthropy5m 50s
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Simple slides12m 48s
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Every face has a place5m 8s
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Those little extras1m 53s
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Seeing sight lines13m 34s
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Swiss style grids, part 15m 26s
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Swiss style grids, part 26m 54s
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Poetic type5m 20s
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Visual continuity4m 53s
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Find your balance5m 25s
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Procrastiworking with album covers10m 21s
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Looking around: Why it works4m 17s
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Don't fake it2m 3s
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Find the focal point6m 5s
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Tooth and texture8m 35s
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Small and simple5m 37s
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Design challenge: Dino Water3m 36s
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Looking around: Address the audience2m 52s
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Experimenting with borders5m 20s
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Magazine layout triple threat5m 48s
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Product ad comparison4m 5s
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Lanzarote calendar assignment: Revisited5m 24s
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Rewind: Simply beautiful4m 59s
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Rewind: Seeing sight lines13m 33s
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Find your center with typefaces4m 59s
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Maki poster, part 15m 40s
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Maki poster, part 26m 35s
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Quick look: Decoded wallet case1m 2s
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A type of luxury2m 32s
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Quick look: Saltwater restaurant1m 15s
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Quick look: Nick's Cove1m 1s
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Less is more: Book covers5m 22s
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Less is more: Notices5m 25s
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Less is more: Posters4m 44s
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Movement in design4m 16s
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The British Academy: Logo4m 36s
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The British Academy: Type3m 48s
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The British Academy: Grid4m 45s
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Quick look: Teavana rock sugar53s
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Ask John: Authentic advice2m 33s
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Blue Note: Donald Byrd album cover3m 50s
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Blue Note: Caddy Daddy, Part 14m 45s
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Blue Note: Caddy Daddy, Part 24m 28s
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Blue Note: Caddy Daddy, Part 33m 56s
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Ask John: Finding your passion2m 41s
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It's all in the details: Lineweights1m 49s
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Paper flyer redesign4m 6s
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Set a headline with Gossamer3m 54s
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Ask John: New business logo1m 52s
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A new type: Helvetica Now5m 48s
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In detail: Line values2m
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Typographic silence6m 46s
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Rebranded: Uber4m 6s
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Capture connection with authenticity5m 27s
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