RIMS Half Day Seminar Flier

Last Wednesday, Greg Oswell asked me if I'd like to put together the flier for the RIMS (Risk and Insurance Management Society, Inc.) Half Day Seminar coming up in May. It was a challenging project assignment because I only had about 4 hours to work on it before it needed to be sent out. I immediately began brainstorming and researching to come up with ideas for what I was going to do. I visited the RIMS website to find colors and styles that would be fitting. I came up with a complimentary color scheme that I really like: variations of teal and a sort of burnt orange.

As soon as I could, I opened up Illustrator and began drawing. I used the pen tool for most of the design. It took a lot of patience to get all the details just the way that I wanted them. I used the smooth tool when I needed to fix jagged lines, but the smooth tool doesn't always work as well as just using the direct selection tool to fix things. The direct selection tool gives me a lot more control, whereas with the smooth tool you never quite know what you're going to get.

Once I was happy with the design, I moved on to the hard part -- the text. Oswell had given me a lot of content to fit onto this page, and it is quite a task to choose fonts and placements so that the integrity of the design is not lost. Surprisingly, this part took longer than it took to draw the graphic portion of the flier. I visited a website that I often use to find unique fonts called DaFont.com. The fonts that I ended up using were Niagara Solid, English, and, the most commonly seen, Trebuchet MS.

Fortunately, I did not have to try to replicate the sponsors' logos because Oswell had copies of them for me to add to the flier. There is some content left out of the flier because the information was not confirmed yet, and the file was going to be sent to someone else for that content to be edited. For this reason I included the fonts that I used in the folder where the AI file was saved so that the content could be edited with those same fonts. I was very happy with the way that this flier turned out. If I had more time, I think I could have done even more with it, but it is possible that adding more could have been too much.

Here is last year's flier, which I did not design:


Here is the flier that I did design: