LCA Prospectus analysis

The first impression you receive from the LCA prospectus is a good one. The designers have utilised foil blocking on the front, making the cover stand out straight away. It gives the book a high end look and would immediately grab your attention. However almost straight away this first impression is ruined. The use of the semi-transparent polygons that start on the first page and continue throughout the prospectus, don't sit well with the large bodies of text that are used on many of the pages. They are not only distracting but look out of place behind the horizontal text. They fragment the page and I feel make the composition unbalanced.

The back page has a large area of whitespace. This can be a strong element of some designs but in this case it looks like it is missing something. There either needs to be some text or the pattern needs to cover the entire back cover.

On some of the first pages, we also see a cream border surrounding an off white page. The colours don't contrast enough for this to be effective. If I were designing it I would either use a bolder colour for the border or leave the page without.

The layout of the prospectus is consistent, with a line splitting up each page and text and images sitting across either one or two of the columns. I personally would have used 3 columns at least as I feel it would give more scope for variation. But the 2 column grid still works well and is legible. I also like the way that even on pages without large amounts of text they have still put in some sections of the line to keep the same format throughout. 

Although this nicely balanced layout is used in the majority of pages in the prospectus, there are a few pages which go against it and look awful. Images seem to float in random spaces on the page, not lining up with anything. On top of this, the images are all random sizes, which again ruins the consistency. These pages make the prospectus look rushed and unprofessional.

The prospectus has been printed to a high quality. I have already mentioned the foil blocking but the paper stock feels as if it is high quality, the images used are crisp and the colours are vibrant. 

Overall the prospectus has been designed fairly well in my opinion. It has been ruined with a few mistakes and with some slight changes I feel it could be an aesthetically pleasing publication