Chris Collins' MAREKETING MAKEOVER is a series of case studies from his daily design work, showing design befores and afters.

Let me start this Marketing Makeover by restating that this post is for information purposes only. It is intended to inform and empower designers and entrepreneurs/business owners who care about the visual marketing process and apreciate receiving thoughts and strategies they can consider on their own projects.

By no means is this posting designed to ridicule or devalue the design of the designer who initially created the “before” piece. I do not know (nor care to know) the circumstances under which the original artwork was designed and therefore make no judgement about their level of skill.

Enough of a disclaimer? Great! Here’s the patient….

Right away I realized the following issues:

• WRONG MAIN FONT
The red to yellow main title that reads “Party Thru College” is a rather old-world serif font. Definitely not something young audiences would associate with. Also the font does not at all invoke a “college” feel.

• WRONG FONT TREATMENT
Treating the font with the lower arch or “bulge” makes it look more like a wild west Saloon sign than anything to do with college. I think that the previous designer might have carved it to make more room for the picture, but what’s more important…the book title or some illustration?

• TOO MANY FONTS
This whole thing is too busy. There are too many shapes and too many colors fighting for my attention. That’s why you lose interest in a subject…there are too many elements fighting for attention.

• WRONG OVERALL COLOR
In simple terms there are colors that sell more than others. I see the colors red and pink and both of these colors sell poorly in combination with one another. They should each be used carefully and rarely in combination with many other colors (yes, there are a million exceptions).

• WRONG COLOR COMBINATION
Combining red, pink and yellow is a problem. And because there’s no dominant color, there is no real visual brand identity.

• NOT ENOUGH CONTRAST
The red-yellow title in front of the pink background is not providing enough contrast to really make the title jump out.

• UNCLEAR WHAT IT IS
The worst part about the design is: I have no idea what the book is about unless I read the copy. People “perceive” much quicker than they read. By the time they start reasing they most likely have already asked themselves what they are reading;. If this question isn’t answered they will lose interest before they ever started reading.

• LOOKS BUSY AND CHEAP
As a result of all the points mentioned above the cover looks cheap. It does not communicate the books’ value and therefore can’t make an effective selling proposition.

HERE'S MY NEW DESIGN

I started by asking myself who would buy the book and realized it wouldn’t be college students buying a humorous book about college. Why? There is no celebrity endorsement, no tie-in with anything branded that they already know and most of their money is spent on clothing or cell phone bills.

Parents also will not buy the book for their kids, so who will? My answer: Friends of parents and aunts and uncles of college students.

Therefore the book must speak to them. It must visually be branded to be the perfect College Gift for under $20. This is not only a great chance for success…it’s the only chance for success.

I did like the gold bar going across the top and understood that the author was set on using the same graphic on the reworked cover. So this is what I decided to keep. Everything else I erased.

My font choice for the title was clear. It had to be a "collegic" font (the word "collegic" is not in Websters Dictionary but people are using it all the time...).

I also wanted the title to look like a branded logo. This way – in case the book was successful – the author would have the possibility to license his logo out to other ventures (like t-shirts and beer mugs).

I decided to replace the ambiguous color choice with a dark blue (which is a much better “selling color”) because I knew that the college font would look so much better in front of a blue background.

The dark blue stands in high contrast to the white lettering which makes the book highly visible and the font very legible from afar.

Dennis Bruce was excited about his new cover and I hope this information was helpful to you.