there is no escape...
…from cheese-related puns. I'm sorry. It's a newsletter for the American Cheese Society. It's called “Omellete Au Fromage”. I had no choice.
Oh, also, this is the special COVID-19 edition, and I later got to digitize it. It's geared toward owners of small, artisan cheese-making operations; novices to the scene, and young too.
When I think “young, artisanal entrepreneurs”, I think “modern-vintage”: woodcut-inspired illustrations, slab serifs, color-blocking, those sorts of things.
As such, I looked to old catalogues (think Sears Roebuck) for the layout, German Expressionist woodcuts for the illustrations, and some of Trader Joe's branding to help figure out how to blend the old with the new.
One element of the concept involved text wrapping around the illustrations. Unfortunately, I ran into some issues with readability when the start of each sentence shifted leftward.
Taking another look at my inspiration, I found that they laid the images out such that wrapped sentences only shifted to the right, following the direction we read in. A colleague corroborated and verified my thinking, so I quickly reorganized my layouts to accommodate.
In order to create an efficient illustration workflow, I quickly created mock-ups of the illustrations—using the pen tool—in InDesign as I roughed in my layouts; so as to inform my spacing and sizing, as well as allowing me to better model my wrapped text.
Once I had the basic shapes, I copied them into Illustrator to use as reference, developed and tweaked them, and added the details. I used a roughen effect on them, with matching settings, in order to speedup the process and to give them some stylistic consistency.
