Over the holiday many businesses need a little something extra to highlight some of their sales and promotions. One of my greatest patrons, Spa de Paris in San Antonio Texas likes to run seasonal promotions for all types of holidays so I have the pleasure of exercizing my creativity and creating some very nice compositions for this high end spa.
We produced several seasonal graphics for Christmas but this “Winter in Paris” themed layout was my favorite.
Connie, the owner of Spa de Paris, loves to celebrate the holidays in style. After our Christmas promotions we quickly followed them up with a round of New Years graphics. This series of graphics was produced specifically for sharing on social media and designed to look great in the many different layouts that it might inhabit like web and mobile devices. Many times if a graphic is to be presented on both social media and on the website several different version will need to be produced in order to accomodate the variety of sizes but the real reason is to keep things looking great.
When a website visitor clicks on a social media ad and then finds themselves on your website with branding elements that are similar in style to those on the social media site in helps create a sense of continuitty in the website visitors expereince which can help weigh in on their decision to choose your business once there.
We also did a quick sereis of image for Black Friday sales and then quickly modified them to suite a similar promotion for Cyber Monday a few days later.
Through my experiments with graphic design for Spa de Paris I feel that I’ve discovered the typeface with suites the brand very well. Their logo, which I interited when I stared working with Spa de Paris is set in a serif typeface but it sometimes seems to fall apart a little if I don’t apply an additional stroke at smaller sizes. I’ll admit I’ve never done research to discover what it is. I was never provided with a proper vector or anythign that would assist in my quest but being resolute to maintain a consistent brand image I’ve been experimenting with serf typefaces from the start.
A Serif Well Suited For Sharing
The typeface their logo was originally set in had delecate stroke and didn’t give me much contrast to work with. This only becomes a problem when I create a crystal clear banner, resample it for web and then publish it. I have to admit the facebook scrapper harsly, which pulls your website images into the facebook social media site for sharing, samples images to reduce their size and many of the finer details of graphcis can get horribly distored when shared accross a varitey of soical media platforms. I think google’s is the sharpest, facebook being the toughest. I feel like Baskerville is a good choice when you need a serif to share and it comes in a number of flavors to play with.
Baskerville has some special characters that you can count on.
John Baserville was a Brit and back in 1757 he designed this typeface called Baskerville, and it was supposed to be his masterpiece. Just like good ol’John I think he needed a typeface that wasn’t as delicate to improve the legibility of printed materials at the time. One of the things that are of note about this typeface is that it comes in a broad range of flavors like SemiBold and Bold Italic. The italic flavors have some special cursive peculiarites that work great in designs and really compliment the base typeface. This is demonstrated in the “f” of the italized word “from” contained in the orange and pink themed Happy New Years “Bonne Annee” facebook share images (above) and the loop in the center of the “w” in the .
