When TerraHawk contacted us to design their new booklet for the IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police), which if anyone is checking started last weekend (October 3-7th), we knew we'd be working fast and hard to get this thing designed and printed inside of a week. We also knew that there wouldn't be a lot of time to plumb the depth of our creativity. It was one of those, “Don't try to be original. Just try to be good.¹” kind of projects.

So, armed with photos taken by the client, the layouts of two previous versions of the brochure, and a whole lot of notes about things to improve, we set out to design a 16 page booklet in 16 hours, including designing and imposing six sets of vehicle graphics on a photo of an existing truck.

Some sets were more difficult to achieve than others. This army truck involved recreating the correct three point perspective and lens distortion to match the pattern to the photo. That was also a problem with superimposing the vehicle over the background graphic in the original booklet, which we resolved by avoiding it altogether. Although it would have been possible to find or take photos with the matching vanishing point and lens distortion, it would have taken far more time than we had, or money than was in the budget.

Another challenge was organizing vital reporting information. In the original booklet the testing report was copied verbatim in to the booklet, which made it hard to understand, and placed it outside of the flow of information presented in the book. The test results were also split onto two pages, which made the user flip back and forth in order to understand the information presented. Using a two-column layout with a table allowed us to get all the testing data onto one page.

So, although given more time, we could have done more and made it better, we're pretty proud of the result. Let this be an object lesson to all you designers out there: Don't let the perfect be the perfect be the enemy of the good, and if you only have time to execute one comp, it'd better be a good one.

¹ This quote is attributed to Paul Rand, a perennial favorite source of inspiration for just about all competent designers, and one of the profession's first design thinkers.