Gallery of Artwork Produced by Dye Printing

Brochure designed and printed for Aqua Sta-Clean of Taylors, SC.

This postcard was originally created as a 4/1 (full color on the front and black and white on the back). After the first color proofs, the client decided to spend the money to go 4/4.

The client provided a stack of photos of his employees and also two satisfied customers who gave testimonials. The year before, I had designed a postcard for this company using just text on that clear sparkling water background. It was rejected in favor of a nice shot of an actual pool. When the client returned--always a good sign--I pulled up his logo and found the PhotoShop file still existed. Using it as a sidebar for the text and logo, I submitted this treatment along with 4 other ideas.

The previous year the company was called Sta-Clean. Now I needed to add the "Aqua." I used the font, Triplex Condensed Black, but in adding the "Aqua" I was underwhelmed by the lowercase "Q"--the tail swept almost straight down. It didn't work very well and hit the capital "P" in a rotten tangent. I typed in a tilde, converted the whole text block to paths, unjoined it, and positioned the tilde under the Q. I deleted the offending tail and joined the new tilde tail. The wave-like image was a happy coincidence.

I exported the whole FreeHand file into PhotoShop and worked out a transparency (with a brightened duplicate layer of the water texture) and added a stroke of the corporate blue. The shadow was run through two distortions (Wave and Ripple) softened with Gaussian Blur, and made 60% transparency.

The reverse side utilized the FreeHand logo (since it had to be very small), the water texture, and two photos of happy customers. A short testimonial blurb was added beneath. We managed to fit in the address, phone number, and even had space for an address label and postage!

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