This guide is perfect for college students studying abroad in Florence, Italy. Of course, this brochure can be used by anyone traveling to Florence; what makes it perfect for students is its simplicity. The students using this guide are lazy and don’t want to read a 100-page guide, they want something simple they can carry around everywhere. What this guide offers isn’t everything they need to know but the most important things they need to know in order to truly experience Florence.
I started with the right side/the first page of the brochure. I made the background color beige/gold to match the fancy artifacts and buildings in Italy. I then put one of the artifacts right in the middle and put a border around it to make it look fancier. The way I placed the writing on the first page was designed to look elegant. For the second page, I found my favorite pictures of Florence, put a border around them, and stacked them to make them look like a natural stack of photos that a traveling photographer would take. I put the names of the best sights in Florence to guide the reader. For the third page, I put the very basics of Italian to allow the traveler to have – even if its very minimal – a conversation with a local.
I used Canva to create this brochure. I started with a template but I realized that I didn’t like any of the templates that Canva had so I basically deleted everything on the template and did everything on my own. It’s a brochure so it’s basically 3 pages. For the first page, I made the color beige by clicking on the background, going to the color icon on the top left, and choosing beige. For the artifact image, I got it off Canvas inventory, resized it, put it in the middle, right-clicked the image, clicked edit image, went to boarders, and chose that boarder. I then clicked the Text icon on the left side to write my Title and Subtitle. For the second page, I got pictures off Pexels and Canvas inventory. Similar to the first page, I resized them and put borders on them. What I did differently is that I stacked the pictures on top of each other. I then googled best sights in Florence and put it there in text. For the third/left page, I google translated what I thought were the most important Italian phrases and put them on the page. I also made the background gold/beige to match the first page.
I’m going to be Studying Abroad in Italy fall semester so with this project I learned not only technical skills but also useful information that will help me fully experience Florence. I’ll definitely be using this guide that I created. This project taught me that simplicity is very important when communicating. I made this so that it can actually be used; I want to genuinely help and guide my audience so I made it as simple as possible while also incorporating important information. Similarly to communicating, I also wanted to make the design consumable so I made it as simple as possible.
What I want to do the same for the next project is create something that directly applies to my life. This makes it more fun and also educational.