Discover RSA | Issue 108 | Summer 2018
Designed by James Brook for the Friends of the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 2018
Booklet | 210 x 148 mm | 16 pages
Printed by Events Armoury, Edinburgh
Having re-designed this newsletter in 2016 and then working on three subsequent issues, the Royal Scottish Academy decided to use their in-house designer instead. I was approached again in early 2018 to update the design of the newsletter, which had now finally become a 16 page A5 booklet; a change I had planned in 2016, but never implemented as the Academy had not approved this move while I was doing the design. I wanted to create a clean, rationalised design based on a grid, with a limited palette of colours and with just one typeface in different weights throughout. By keeping – almost – all of the typography aligned to the same baseline grid the newsletter looks ordered and rationalised. Taking visual cues from the design of the RSA Friends membership leaflet that I had designed the previous month, I used the burgundy that I had used in my refresh of the RSA Friends logo as an accent colour alongside an extended palette of greys. I typeset the newsletter in Aktiv Grotesk, a typeface that sits well with the Akzidenz Grotesk that I used on the logo and that is easy to read, even at a small scale. For the cover, I had originally planned to have a new treatment of the Discover RSA logo at the same scale and treatment as the membership leaflet so that they sat alongside each other, making a cohesive suite of printed materials, but the client felt that their membership might confuse the two items so I did an update of the original logo instead.
