ESTABLISHING A STYLE

Here at Exsilio's Creative Department, we pride ourselves on our ability to approach any project with an original and unique vision. This is especially true when it came time to brand our own printed materials (including various case studies, offering flyers, and our all-up company brochure). Gathering references from both the Swiss-style as well as post-modernism, our team of designers looked towards the avant-garde aesthetic for both creative inspiration and guidance. It was here, that we developed a simple but elegant approach to our newly acquired collateral. By using basic geometric shapes and a limited color palette, we employed the most fundamental rule of graphic design... "Less is more".Through such a minimalist ideology, we were then faced with the challenge of how do we differentiate between the flyers; and more importantly, how do we speak to the content of each individual offering? This meant introducing some form of "personalization" in order to make each piece unique. A simple resolve was adding a collage of background elements to form an individual look & feel for each of the handouts.

RETHINKING THE APPROACH

When it came time to develop our own department's flyer, we saw it as an opportunity to display our creative talents. By doing something a little different and adopting the overall look & feel of our previous materials we demonstrated one of Exsilio's finest traditions - redefining what you thought possible! What better way to communicate such imagination and ingenuity than to implement some form of traditional art practice - in this case, a series of hand drawn sketches. If a graphic artist is to make an impactful design than it must not only be aesthically pleasing but it must also contain substance. From a theoretical standpoint these two applications (of both formal and contemporary design) posed an interesting challenge to our creative team due to the fact that they represent two competing forms of thought. Naturally, print design is based out of the contemporary approach to graphic art, which is the theory of "replication". Ultimately, this debate has divided the art community for centuries. The ability to duplicate a piece of art allows for reproduction on a mass scale - such has been the foundation of graphic design within the business model. Whereas, fine art including painting, sketching, and other traditional practices, prides itself on its inability to be replicable. Thus, we can clearly begin to see how Exsilio's innovative approach defied the norm and combined both forms of design into one successful piece of art. Below is an example of the Creative Services flyer as well as some of the sketches which did not make the cut.

I can’t think of too many projects I’ve been involved with that didn’t interact with some type of content in one way or another. While it’s ideal to have the final content to use during development, that’s not always possible.  The content may not exist yet, or it may be confidential  - whatever the case may be I often  need to use sample content as a placeholder while developing.  While I could always copy and paste some text from a website to use as a placeholder there is a better way that gives me much more control and is just as quick and easy. 

In most Microsoft Office apps you can generate a block of sample content by typing =rand() and then pressing enter.   If you want more control over the content that is generated there are two parameters you can include.  The first parameter is the number of paragraphs to generate.  For example =rand(4) will spit out 4 paragraphs.   The second parameter is the number of sentences to include in each paragraph.  So =rand(2,5) will give you 2 paragraphs with 5 sentences in each.  

If you want to generate ‘lorem ipsum’ text you can use =lorem() instead.  With =lorem() you can also pass the two parameters control the number of paragraphs and sentences that are generated.