Pittsburgh Laundry Event Invitation

Pittsburgh Laundry flyer inside.

Not everything is a masterpiece, supports a cause, furthers the arts or involves nearly every skill you have, but that doesn’t mean the customer doesn’t expect you to take it seriously and design a piece that will inspire customers to flock to his event. I want my customer to be successful; after all, that success turns back around to me.

The event is an open house for owners of commercial washers and dryers to stop in and see what’s new, bring a utility bill and assess their usage and see how much they’d save, meet with factory representatives and eat food. So how do you design something that says all that and appeals to the various people who own laundromats and apartment buildings with coin-op equipment?

This company has these events spring and fall each year, and I’ve been designing for them, through a print broker, for six years. Each year we need to make the design look different enough that customers don’t think they are getting the same thing, but the same enough that they recognize it right away in a pile of business mail. Last year I’d used green, gray and yellow with some red, this year I went with process blue and warm red with yellow, screaming of an autumn afternoon.

When I began designing for this customer my first thought was looking in the window of a front-load washer or dryer, perhaps seeing money floating around in there, with text wrapped around the window, but I thought I may have seen something like that already.

After looking at a few other designs and advertisements and seeing the stainless steel look is in, I decided to combine that high-tech basis with primary colors and an unusual, whimsical, kind of retro font, kind of like…a laundromat. Initially, the photos were all from stock photo sources and it gave me the idea I needed to stop in some laundromats to see what kind of photos I could get. Eventually the manufacturer provided images and I asked to communicate directly with them. They can provide several hundred hi-res images and I can use as many as I want. If washers and dryers are your thing, I’m going to show you as many as I can in interesting shots and at unusual angles so you want to pick this up, open it up and see what it’s all about.

And thanks to InDesign for the ability to change opacity settings and create type effects like “emboss” right there in the file with live type, especially considering the information included in these things changes easily.

I designed this for a print broker customer, though in this case I’ve always worked directly with the customer in sending proofs and correcting.

Here’s the outside layout.

Pittsburgh Laundry outside.

Here is one from autumn 2010 so you can see how it’s migrated in color and layout.

Pittsburgh Laundry tri-fold, outside

Pittsburgh Laundry inside

Tags: design, design printed material, graphic design, pittsburgh laundry, primary colors in design, tri-fold flyer