The Best of Brochure Design 12

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(Fogra 39) Job:01-29775 Title:RP-The Best of Brochure Design 12

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Luxury

Julia Hoffmann

Museum of Modern Art

New York, New York

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In today’s age, printing has become a luxury. While budgets have been cut and environmental

consciousness has risen, clients often default to emails or electronic flyers. For designers, it’s a

shame. The workload is usually the same, if not more, but the results aren’t as tangible. Designers

long for the ephemeral quality of print work, such as the opportunity to select a paper and make

folding prototypes. That’s why the design of brochures has been getting better. At MoMA, where

the grab rate of any printed material is 30 percent, we have to be conscious of what we put out

there. With almost 3 million visitors a year, a lot of brochures end up on the floor of the lobby and

throughout the museum at the end of a busy day. This reality resulted in a drastic cut of printed

materials. Regardless, and luckily, there are plenty of other opportunities to rethink brochures and

distribute them in places where they’re least expected. For example, our team came up with a zine

for an exhibition that was printed very cheaply on newsprint and then distributed in neighborhood

cafés and bookstores, where people had time to browse. A zine seemed more effective and afford-

able than a small print ad in a daily newspaper.

Twice a year, the education department at MoMA offers a teen program with classes and work-

shops. With a tight budget, we have to work around some restrictions: The client wants a poster

that schools can put on bulletin boards but simultaneously wants it to function as a brochure,

listing all the different classes offered. We looked at school bulletins and realized that a big poster

would take up too much space, and a brochure would get lost in the sea of advertising materials

out there. So we settled on a vertical fold-out brochure with two sides, so that a school could pin

up each side and still have enough room for other announcements. Because our printing budget

was limited, we used colored paper to add an extra color, which made the poster/brochure stand

out visually even more.

Once we settled on this format, we assigned the project to our current intern, who gets briefed

directly by the client about the content of the upcoming courses and activities (every year the teen

program has a loosely connected theme). The basic type styles are already set; however, each

brochure needs some amount of retypesetting and rearranging of text based on the new content.

Underneath the text layer, the interns explore a wide range of aesthetic and conceptual treatments

relating to the course selection. We like to experiment with technical printing techniques such as

using two- and three-color printing, colored paper, overprinting, or unusual Pantone color com-

binations. Our interns always have different backgrounds and aesthetic strengths, and we like to

push unique, fun, and experimental illustration and pattern options. This has proven to be a perfect

teaching tool for young designers. We love that this process works well for a series, but that each

intern is unique. The intern, who is usually still a student in college, works on the project from start

to finish, and learns about client relationships, concept development, typesetting, and production.

Our portfolio benefits from the different personalities at work. It’s a win-win situation.

Julia

Luxury

Julia Hoffmann

Museum of Modern Art

New York, New York

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