Viking Graphic Design

Viking Village is a locally owned grocery store in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. We do a variety of projects for them such as signs, advertisements, event promotions, recipe cards, and more.

Most projects are printed from their office, so we have to keep a few things in mind when printing yourselves. First, the projects can’t have a bleed. This means that you can’t have ink going to the edge of the page because your printer can’t go to the edges of the page. Additionally, you also want to be conscious of your ink usage. You don’t want to print a big black box when printing yourself. This will use up your ink real fast, so it’s best to use color sparingly, and stay away from large photos or boxes of color.

Viking Village is often throwing challenges our way with adding a lot of content on a flyer or poster. Here’s a great example of what a graphic designer can do to organize the information and use graphic elements to make all the text and imagery manageable. I must say, this is an art in itself. As a big fan of white space, it is like a puzzle trying to fit things in order. If you look at these flyers, you see the content stays similar but the design has a theme based on the month.

For this project, it’s a monthly newsletter, so we add a theme to each one to mix things up and add some character. We definitely suggest you do something similar if you have content that says similar but you want each edition to look unique. We have a fun time pondering what will be the theme for the upcoming month.

Pro Tip: Coupons don’t have to be boring!

We never want to create a coupon that is plain and gets thrown away. One of our favorites is the Free Cookie coupon below, and it adds so much flavor to what could be a boring design. Then there’s some printing has limitations on color (like the last sample with 2 colors), and if you design keeping this in mind, you can still create a eye-catching composition even though you’re limited.