WCS Brochure

Brochure front and back exterior (top), and interior
spread (bottom). Click for larger image.

I used to a lot of print design in the 90's - brochures and booklets, full stationery systems (letterhead, envelope, and business card), ads for newspapers and magazines, book covers, DVD and CD packaging, flyers, posters and more. However, over the past ten years, that work has declined significantly - and the print pieces I do create these days are often handed over to the client for production.

I guess you can owe this decline to a couple factors. First, I trust you may have heard of the Internet. Many of the business I develop logos for these days are almost completely web-based - they still need business cards (I always use VistaPrint these days), but it's rarely worth their time to create offset-printed envelopes (if anything, they print their own labels) or letterhead (a Word template almost always suffices). Aside from those essentials, and some more straightforward business forms and documents (estimates, invoices, even fax cover pages!), these clients don't need much in terms of printing in the 2000's. For more specialty pieces, like display materials (large posters, banners, table tents) they're more than likely to hand the project over to a vendor who may have an in-house design department (or even a single designer) who can put together a design - and then it gets printed or produced under the same room. Who can argue with that kind of convenience? Not I. And small businesses are much more likely to advertise online than in more expensive print publications with longer lead times, less focused audiences and increased fees. What I said in 1993 still holds true: "The Internet is Good." (I never really said that in '93 - '96, maybe, but not '95).

The other factor is home-based printing. Up until the early 90's, consumer-grade printers either really sucked, or they were really expensive - sometimes both. But nowadays, you can get a more than decent inkjet, LED or laser printer for your home business for a reasonable amount of money, and produce your own printed materials in quantities too small for a commercial printer. Even brochures, booklets, and other material requiring specialty finishing (like folding, trimming, or binding) is achievable. If I were a teenager now, I'd have a publishing empire going full speed.

Detail from interior spread. Do you wish the text was larger, so
you could read it? If so, then you are a nerd.

Where am I going with this? The piece here, for a water consulting firm named WCS, was created about four or five years ago, when I was still getting a decent trickle of print work. As is often the case, the client did not have an unlimited budget, so they asked for a two-color piece. I designed the piece in Adobe InDesign, selecting a fairly straight blue spot color, which I used along with black. Initially I tried making the photos into duotones, which means they're created using a percentage of black and the spot blue - but (from what I remember) I was reminded of the crappy, cheap textbook photos of my youth, and so I went with all-blue photos - which are called "monotones", by the way - as if you couldn't have guessed that.

I didn't assist with the printing of the final piece - the client went through a few rounds of text changes (quite a few, as I recall), but once it was finalized, I handed over my InDesign files, as well as a .pdf, and they - I assume - took it from there. This was another of those nebulous projects where I never hear from the client again after my role is complete - I can only assume the client, or one of their vendors, went off and printed the final brochures. I hope they didn't get nutty with my source files and switch the photos back to duotones - that would hurt my feelings.

Studio Crossroads

When my band Restraining Order recorded our first CD Last Time You Took Me Back, we chose a local studio called Studio Crossroads. The home studio (though that term does it a disservice) was owned by the father of a friend of my niece, and I didn't have high expectations when I originally checked it out, but it was an amazing studio, home-based or not.

The studio consisted of one large recording room where you could easily fit an eight-piece band and all their gear. Off of that main room was a control room (with a hallway that lead to a waiting area and bathroom), and four smaller recording rooms of various sizes - one big enough for a large drum set, a couple good for guitarists and amps, and one small enough for a single vocalist.

All of the rooms were guarded against electro-magnetic interference, and none of the walls were parallel - a difficult engineering feat in a home studio, but an ideal way to avoid harsh sound reflections. All of the walls were wood paneled, and the lighting was offset - it was a very relaxing environment in which to record.

And not only that, but the owner/engineer Mike was a great guy to record a CD with - we should know, as we were in there for six months, recording and/or mixing once or twice a week over that period. He was technically proficient, but more important for us, Mike was an excellent sounding board for us band members, helping us come together when the road got rough.

I took my Canon AE-1 into Studio Crossroads several times, for what was perhaps the last serious photo series I ever took before going digital. I find it much easier to get shallow depth of field with an analog camera than with a digital camera - in fact, I usual cheat digitally and just blur part of the image in Photoshop. It's never the same, though.

Here are a few of those photos - unfortunately, they don't show the studio itself as much as some of the house instruments and gear in closeup. But music gear is still cool, right? I thought so. Originally these photos were just for me - then Mike asked me if I could develop some marketing material (brochure, website, logo, business cards) for the studio to help promote it, so I thought I could use these images. Then he thought about it more and realized he already had all of his available time booked with bands waiting for availability, so it didn't make sense to promote the studio - so the marketing material never materialized. Don't be too sad - just a little.

Click for larger versions of each photo.