Unsolicited Design Critiques

I’m a bitch, and I have photos to prove it.

Every once in a while I get a flier from my apartment complex. The drill is largely the same every time. I come home to find a white piece of paper shoved in my doorjamb. The black text is always a generic font and it contains a general message about the property. This particular flier was special.

My pain. Can you feel it?

The last apartment manager we had spent time on her fliers. They were still white paper and black text, but they were checked carefully for grammar and spelling. She obviously spent time checking them.

She’s gone from our apartment complex and we have a new manager. The newest flier is special and does not inspire confidence.

I had difficulty making sense of the sentences. I couldn’t figure out what exactly he wanted me to do. Why was he repeating himself? There are worse things of course, but this sort of flier doesn’t bode well for the apartment complex or for the new manager.

I try to not be the sort of person who always has only bad to say. If I don’t like something or think something is inadequate, I try to find something good to say about it or to help in some way. It’s important to try to improve on a thing, not just tell someone it sucks and move on.

The only solution I had to my “make sure you’re helping” problem was to mock up a design for the manager and put it into his inbox for Monday. I fire up Pages (because InDesign would be too much at this point) and open up a template. Without changing any of the colors or fonts, I put together the green design you can find here in the post.

New and slightly improved!

The entire design took an hour, all told. This included going out and snapping a few photographs of the property. The effort was minimal, the design was quickly implemented, and the flier conveyed the message he wanted to get out

It still contains a bit of fluff. You could pretty easily rework the design to be even more effective. The colors could likely be matched better for the photographs or to the season we’re currently in. Perhaps, even this close to the holidays, it should have been festive.

After printing a poor copy (who knew I needed color ink again), I penned a note. Let’s see what he does with it. Hopefully, I can help him get his fliers a bit more effective.

Update (2009.12.21)

Well, the apartment manager contacted me today to ask me how I did that and for the working files. I may just have a quarterly project.