Brochure Design – Astrid Stavro

Brochure Design – Astrid Stavro

In my Visual Communications class, I was tasked to create a brochure reflecting the style and aesthetic of graphic designer Astrid Stavro.

From my research on Astrid Stavro’s works, I found that she heavily utilizes grids, even creating notebooks for grids, so it seemed appropriate for me to also use grids for this brochure. I used the same grid layout for all pages to maintain a unified look.

Throughout the brochure, I used certain aspects and features that Stavro uses in her designs. One of these is the use of parallel lines making up a larger image or letter of the alphabet. I was inspired to emulate this on the page displaying Stavro’s London’12 Typeface, where I placed lines of various heights. I also used this on the front page; on Astrid Stavro’s initials, I copied the paths of one section of the letters and placed them behind the letters. As well as being inspired by Stavro’s use of parallel lines, it also alludes to the pages of a book, which is relevant as Stavro also designs for books.

I also noticed that Stavro’s designs usually feature a large graphic and overall have a clean and simple style; I tried to incorporate this into my design, as well.

When choosing the colours, I noticed that Stavro uses a lot of muted or soft colours in her designs, and usually features one colour per page or work. Following this, I limited the use of colour to only one or two per spread, but sometimes chose my own colours that I thought suited Stavro’s overall style or that particular page.

For the table of contents, I was inspired by Stavro’s Spanish Advertising Annual Books, where one of the pages features rows and columns with large numbers and smaller text beneath them.

For the “Art of the Grid” page, I struggled between showing the grid but overwhelming the page at the same time. I decided to only show a couple of lines of the grid and to suggest the rest of the grid structure by placing the images within the grid.

With the Piano Competition posters page, I placed the text in line with one of the rows of the poster.

I also did this with the AGI BCN Congress Guides and the Travesías book covers; I drew lines along the graphics within the images and placed the text in line with them. My aim with this was to unify the text and the images. For the Congress image, I also placed a grey rectangle behind it in order to highlight the graphic.

With the “A Visual Language” pages, I chose one of the postcards that Stavro created for Backlist, where she uses a simplified image matching the top message. I thought that this example was appropriate for this section, and also thought that the minty colour would fit with the overall colour scheme.

For the back cover, I was inspired by Stavro’s Imaginary Menagerie. Astrid Stavro has six letters in both her first and last name, and it fits perfectly in the 6×6 grid that I had created in the beginning.