Making a Traditional and Digital Flyer

Designing a Library Flyer
by Debra Orellana

Promoting Teen Tech Week sparked my interest after exploring several other library
celebrations to use in designing a traditional flyer and its digital version
(using the Smore website).

Brainstorming before creating the traditional flyer helped in developing a visual
and contextual theme. Anime characters popular with teens was the concept for making
the background creature with Gremlin-like eyes and smile using the shapes option
in a Word doc. I used electric neon-like greens and yellows reminiscent of
the early digital glowing numbers seen in Casio calculators in the 1970s.
I counter-balanced the first hues with a complimentary color of purple for the eyes
and the text box background color. By using bright colors and the anime-eyed character,
I hoped to add a sense of excitement.

Traditional flyer:

I also wanted to create movement by placing the headline and body copy at a right angle to capture some teen spirit and increase their curiosity. The next step was to write the copy in a way that would include enough information without requiring too much reading. To break up the key ideas of the flyer, the use of questions in small glowing type was used as pointers to the left of its corresponding information.

In designing the digital version of this flyer using Smore, it was tricky in trying to re-design the layout of my traditional flyer. Smore does not offer many options in designing a layout, but this could be a good thing given the types of electronic gadgets that could potentially receive the Smore flyer message. In this context, it might be best to keep things very simple and streamlined. In order to bring in a picture into Smore it needs to be a jpeg. or tiff file, so I did some file conversions using elements of my original anime gremlin design. I uploaded the character into my Smore flyer which added the original flyer color scheme, and I am pleased with the final digital flyer result, although there is no neon-like greens available for use.

Digital flyer:  https://www.smore.com/3fgwc