Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Fiesta Week!

So if you're in the Durham Region, or from the Durham Region, or have heard of the Durham Region... or really even none of the above... you should know it's Fiesta Week!

Fiesta week is a week long "taste of Durham" multicultural festival where various pavilions represent the diverse cultural heritage of the region, and of their home countries.

It started with a parade on Fathers' Day that went all around Oshawa and continues with food and fun most every night all around town. We're new to the area, so it's really neat to see what's going on, and apparently is a big deal :P I've had a number of people who are local to the area tell me the whole thing is a lot of fun and that they go every year.

So what does all this mean? Why am I, and Intelligent Designs by default, interested in this event? Well, first for all the aforementioned reasons, but also because I got to create some stretch targets in an area I don't often play in: book layout and design.

Every year the Folk Arts Council puts together a publication that gets handed out during Fiesta Week that talks about the pavilions, advertises local businesses that help, and act as a guide book to multiculturalism. This year I was approached to help create overall designs for said book, and eventually worked to help create the layout for the whole thing!

This was a neat little feather in my cap for several reasons: I don't often work on editorial pieces but now I have a complete piece for the portfolio; my completed work was seen by the most amount of people ever, and completely advertised for me (as opposed to pieces for clients where I don't get to advertise myself on it directly); I got to look behind the scenes of booklet layout that will be important when I finally finish all my projects that will need rulebooks and the like.

Anyway, if you're in the Durham region, check out Fiesta Week and grab a book. It's a fancy double-sized version this year, so take two ;)

As always, thanks for reading!

The front cover of the book


Pavilion layouts. Over a dozen in total

Some concepts I created as a special anniversary banner