From the course: Graphic Design for Business Professionals

Solution: Applying the PARC system

From the course: Graphic Design for Business Professionals

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Solution: Applying the PARC system

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Alright, hopefully you've now completed your first challenge and now we're going to talk about the solution to that challenge. So, if you remember, we were tasked with rearranging and reconfiguring the Houston Aeronautics business card that we talked about earlier. And so, here is my proposed solution, which you've already seen in the beginning of the course, but now I want to walk you through exactly what my thought process was while I was building this. And so, whether you did this in Adobe Illustrator or you cut it out and did it manually, either way, you're still getting the principles down. And hopefully, this is helping you learn and apply that PARK system that we've been talking so much about. So, I'm going to go back over here to my challenge document and the first thing that I would do with this is I would change the color, because the white business color just doesn't go with the Houston Aeronautics Company, their, they've got very dark color palettes. So, what I'm going to do first is, just change the color of this, and you could've just written on your piece of paper, change background to gray, change text to white, etc. And it would've been the exact same thing as what I'm doing here. And so, what I'm going to do now is, I'm going to take the logo element, and we'll select that. And then, what I'm going to do is, just duplicate that. On the Mac you can hold down your Option key, on the PC you hold down your Alt key and then just drag this down until it gets where you want it to go. And then I can right click, choose a range, bring to front and there we go. And I would also come in here and change the colors a bit. We want that to be white. So, that looks pretty good. And so, now what I'm going to do, because I've got the logo elements all grouped and placed over here on the top left. What I want to do now, is group the other like items. All this information here. So, what I'm going to do is, just start to build the address out, so 1234 Main Street and then we'll also get the phone numbers and we'll bring it down, something like that, and then I'll select all three of these and basically what we want to do is we want to line them all together. So, I'm going to go to the Align panel in Illustrator, or you could just line them us manually with your hands, if you are using the cutouts. And then, we'll just line those to the right edge. When we do that, we can bring those down and put them into place. I'm going to bring those to the front. And there we go. Final piece, of course, is my name. And so, I can just bring that down as well. And I'll bring that to the front, and I'm going to make sure that there's some contrast down here, because my name is the most important piece of all this information. So, what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to make it white. That's going to help it stand out a little bit, and I can also change the font weight to bold, making it a little bit easier for me to discern my name from the rest of the information. Then what I'm going to do is just select both of these. And then I'll click an extra time, right there on main street, to make it the key object, and that just means I'm aligning based on where it's located, and then we'll just line up everything like so. So, then I'll click away, and there we go. So now, I've grouped the like items of the logo up here in the top left, I've grouped the like items of the information down here in the bottom right. I've got good contrast because I've got dark background and light colored text. I've also got some contrast between this piece of information and the address information. So, everything is starting to follow those principles, I've also created good visual weight across this layout and I think that it looks very visually balanced and it also has some nice clean simplicity as well. So, that's my solution and how I would go about rearranging this business card. How did you rearrange your business card? If you had a different method, I'd love to hear how you did it. So, be sure to watch the feedback movie in this course and shoot me a message.

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