Since January 2013, I have interned with the Public Relations Coordinator for the Honors College. Through this placement, I’ve had the opportunity to learn a lot about effective marketing and advertising. She has taught me some basic Photoshop skills and some need-to-know basics when pertaining to flyers. I’ve even had the chance to make some of my own.
This particular flyer is from the Department of African-American Studies. The content itself is not so bad. Their language and amount of text is perfectly acceptable. It’s the other schematic elements that beg to be addressed.
First of all, this is a Georgia State University flyer. Our color and type guide dictates certain standards for marketing in general. These colors were weak attempts to mimic “GSU Blue” and the other colors expressed in the guide. Further, they completely abandon Gil Sans in favor of fonts that I would argue look cheap and a little childish.
Secondly, the excessive use of punctuation in the title already veers any onlookers from the direction of potentially taking the message seriously. The art of several exclamation and question marks is one usually implemented for elementary audiences… like maybe a flyer for a group of third graders. It serves a purpose in placing emphasis but it doesn’t serve the audience in this case.
Finally, a true mark of rudimentary graphic design is centering everything–which this flyer does. The layout of the page is difficult to read and look at in general.
It’s an unfortunate design fluke because the message and the event itself seem really valuable, but this value is lost in the midst of the design itself.
Ashton Brasher 