Discover RSA | Issue 109 | Autumn 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
The second issue of a newsletter that I originally re-designed in 2016, subsequently designing three further issues before the RSA handed the work to their in-house designer. 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 all of the typography aligned to the same baseline grid the newsletter looks ordered and rationalised – though due to the large amount of copy on some pages, I sometimes had to be more relaxed about remaining faithful to the grid. Taking visual cues from the design of the RSA Friends membership leaflet that I had designed earlier in the year, 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.
