chillman

Ok, I am helping a friend of mine with a brochure for a program that we have where I work. I put this together, and it i only partially finished. I have to add more text, but that is not what I am worried about. I can see that I already need to brighten the baseballs and contrast the upper text more. What else could I do to make it a little more *POW!* Constructive criticism is welcome, but please be nice about it. I appreciate your input.

Chillman

tfoster

Hi there!
It's a nice start, here things I would suggest:
1) Bringing out the text in the top (with the little baseballs) is going to be difficult since the background image has very light and very dark areas. You're going down a good path, light text with a good dark shadow. A bolder font would help pick it off. You could also try darkening the background (i.e., covering it with a dark dark rectangle of color on another layer, and reducing the opacity-perhaps with Multiply as the blend mode.). This will tone the highlights way down and help pop your type even more-right now the background is very distracting since it's also doubling as the main image.
2) I would avoid setting that one line about employees in a smaller font, better to wrap it on two lines since you have the room. Right now it looks really forced, or worse, less important than the other bullets.
3) In the bottom left panel, I would flush that top paragraph left with the rest of the text-unless you intend to add something into the hole there.
4) Same issue with the background as before in that same panel-I wouldn't think you need the art there-particularly since there's an empty one right next to it above the glove (will text be going in there too?)
5) The font for "Play with a Champion" looks like it's skewed to fake an italic-I would try to use a real italic or a different font. I think you could have some more fun with that font seeing as it's the headline, be creative! Some more color there might be good too.

One more thing, I see that this is for a brochure. I'm not sure of your final size or reproduction plans. However, I would recommend that you set the text in a page layout program such as InDesign if you can, rather than doing it in Photoshop.
The reason is that if you do the text in Photoshop it will render at 300 dpi (or whatever you have your image size set at). For small reversed text like you have, that can be bad news (it could end up being fuzzy looking). Better to set the text in InDesign and let the imagesetter render at it's optimal super high dpi as it's meant to be rendered, you'll get much better results (plus it will be easier to format and edit-Photoshop has nice text tools but they're not really geared to intense typesetting needs-and I see you have a lot of tabs and columns working here).
I would keep the headlines in Photoshop since you are applying some effects to them-text that big isn't a problem. It's the little nubbins you have to worry about!

Good luck-can't wait to see the next step!

The Coach

The first thing that I would focus on are the headers. I consider especially "Swing for the fences" hard to read. You might also consider to lower the transparency of the images in the background to make the other text easier to read.
Other than that I do like the overall design, well done

chillman

Thanks guys. Here's an updated one. I think I am done with the exception of the glow on Foodservice advantage, but I am still mulling that over.

tfoster

Lookin' good!
If you're still up for suggestions [confused] here are my thoughts:
1) I agree with JoeD about the headlines being hard to read, right now they're actually the last thing I notice
2) I didn't notice before, but I would rather see the bulleted items line up. What you could do is to take the long one and center it beneath the two (now even) columns and put it back on one line
3) I would be consistent with the capitalization in the bullets. "Your", "New" and "Old" should be capitalized, I wouldn't consider those minor words (like "a" and "the"), they're actually pretty important to your point.

Of course, you may be totally tired of looking at it 8} by now...!