Type of Work: Professional
Project Title: Gage Ave Portfolio CIM (Confidential Information Memorandum)
Client Name: Cushman & Wakefield Waterloo Region
Date Project Completed: July 2020
Role in Project: Graphic Designer, Team Marketing Coordinator
CONTEXT
Describe the client needs / project brief, including project goals and objectives.
The goal for this project was to take dry, financial details from a written text document and turn this into a designed booklet that would be sent via email or printed. This project was to be discrete and kept private as per the Sales Rep’s request, a regular request for “exclusive” private listings. Part of the goal was to also go to the property and take photos of the exterior.
METHOD
Describe your design process including any research, analysis or other information gathering and investigation that contributed to your solution.
For this project, I really focused on typography since the majority of the content was written text and financial data. Although I already had the exact content I needed, I chose to do a pagination first in order to get the idea of what content would fit on what page. After creating the initial indesign document, I first explored a grid for the layout then explored fonts, colours, headers and footers. I then started page by page, adding in the content. Part way through, I had sent a draft version to the sales rep to see the progress. He then gave me a few content edits while I continued to lay out the design. There were a few final edits to the financial numbers after, but it then was completed.
DESIGN PROCESS
Briefly describe the design process from initial concept exploration and presentation to acceptance by the client.
Content collection (files, photography, etc.) and initial file organisation
Low fidelity pagination and sketching of layout
Adobe InDesign file creation, typography style exploration (following brand guidelines), grid system, headers, exploring table design for the financial data
Add in content to InDesign following design principles, creating high fidelity first draft PDF to send to Sales Rep for review.
Receive edits and revisions then send them back for review.
SOLUTION
Describe your design solution/deliverables and how they achieved project goals and objectives.
The biggest challenge of this project was to create a document out of mostly text. Rather than using many beautiful graphics, I had to display financial information in a way that would be easy to read and understand.
I also had to work from a linked excel document with numbers that were constantly changing. So this posed a bit of a challenge as I had to make sure the typography layout was still correct after reimporting the data every time. It was actually my solution to link that excel document into the indesign file rather than having to copy and paste specific numbers every time, this solution helped to drastically reduce errors in the copy, when sending revisions to the sales rep.
RESULTS
Provide quantitative/qualitative evidence of the effectiveness of your solution and/or how overcoming any special circumstances and/or challenges on the project demonstrate the effectiveness of your solution.
This document was effective because it made it much easier and quicker to read the financial content. The linked excel file to the working indesign document was a huge success and that solution was used in many other projects after that as well. It made it much easier for those who did not have access to indesign could easily edit that save excel sheet they were used to using.
The property portfolio was quickly sold within weeks of creating this document. The Sales Rep deemed this extra design process to be effective and proceeded to request other CIM documents to be designed like this in the future. He had received positive feedback on those clients he sent this file to as well.
