April | 2014 | JMC3433 - PR Publications

Newsletter Assignment

By wesmoody in Uncategorized April 10, 2014

This assignment was unique because the size of it gave me a chance to really increase the level of content that I could include. While in the mailer assignment you could only put a few line or so to get your point across, this assignment gave the freedom to really fill it up with content.

I decided that my newsletter would be for OU baseball, the team that I work with most directly. It made sense to me to aim the newsletter at fans that are not close to Norman. I wanted this to be aimed at people who may have a hard time getting to games and feeling involved but also make it something that a casual fan could pick up and enjoy.

PAGE 1

The title includes the acronym WAFO which is the mantra of the new coaching staff and is just everywhere in the baseball program. It stands for We Are Family Omaha and you can’t be around the program without seeing that. I made it a hashtag because they use that on all their tweets and I was hoping to drive traffic to the accounts of the coaches and administrators. The line under that is the motto of the team you could say and suggests the team attitude that the team wants to have.

I included the team’s schedule/results because that is really the whole point of the newsletter and I started two of my articles on the front page.

I used the thin grey line at the top to seperate the title and the body and filled it with some of the programs accomplishments. OU is all about tradition and the more you mention it the better.

PAGE 2

This page feature the award winners for the past month. These are significant awards and I wanted to showcase them and really highlight the best players her. I had some trouble getting the right pictures so that they would look good with the text over them but I was happy with the way they turned out. Offsetting the players in the frame rather than centering them helped to really make the text pop.

I again went with OU’s yearbook solid text for my headlines. It is important to keep that consistent and since that font is used on everything, even on the signs at the stadiums, it really is part of the brand and makes things look recognizable as being OU.

PAGE 3

This page has all my jump articles on it and I like the way I organized the text. I was also happy with how my pull quote turned out. I think putting it here makes sense because there is so much text the reader would be temped not to read it so drawing them in with this made sense to me.

The cutout was a good change from all the other square pictures and worked pretty well here. I wish I had put some kind of shadow on it though in hindsight.

PAGE 4

The last page I saved for my feature story. This was a longer story that I thought was better suited to have its own page. I included my contact info on thus page and added a couple of elements that attempt to drive traffic to soonersports.com

This assignment was really easy once I made my wire frame. that was by far the hardest part. From there it was pretty much just plugging things in.

I have noticed that I have gotten a lot better and faster at basic things like changing tools. I know a TON of shortcuts now and I can really work a lot faster.

Originally posted at Wes Moody PR Publications

Project 3 – Newsletters

By wesmoody in Assignment 3, Assignments, JMC 3343, Newsletter April 10, 2014

For our third project in my Pubic Relations Publications class we had to make a 4 page newsletter. I decided to make my newsletter for the President’s Leadership Class (PLC) members and alumni. This year I am an intern for PLC and it is my job to keep alumni connected with our program. PLC at the University of Oklahoma only lasts for your freshman year. After that you become a student alumni. I made the newsletter to highlight the work the advisors, interns and Burr Scholars have done this year. The newsletter explains what each of positions do. The newsletter has five different stories/ information boxes.

The first story is a letter from the Director of PLC Nanette Hathaway. The second story is from this years PLC Advisors Ally Renfroe and Bear McAfee reflecting on their past year and the PLC class. The third story is from the Jane E. Lawton interns Niki Haddid and myself about the alumni events we planned this year and the last event we have planned the year. The next part of the newsletter is an invitation to our end of year picnic. The picnic is open to current PLCer’s as well as alumni and it is where we announce the new advisors and interns. The last section of the newsletter is called Burr Corner. Burr Scholars are made up of 16 junior and senior PLC members who serve as mentors for the current PLCers. For this section I named all of the Burr Scholars for this year as well as a member spotlight on a junior Burr and a senior Burr.

Since this is for an OU organization I decided to stick with the basic publication colors. I used a linen back ground with black, red, and light blue text. I also made sure to include pictures on every page to add more color. I did not use a very flashy font because I wanted the newsletter to match consistently and look professional.

I have attached pictures of my newsletter if you want to learn more about PLC or check out my design. Enjoy!

Originally posted at OU Public Relations Publications

Assignment Three – Newsletter

By Brooke Strother in Assignment Three, Assignments, JMC 3433 April 10, 2014

For this assignment I chose to do my sorority Gamma Phi Beta.

What began as a newsletter for the sorority nationally, kind of turned into a newsletter for solely the members of my chapter. So there may be a little disconnect between stories…

I found this assignment fun, yet very challenging and I hate to admit that it may not be my best work overall, but I am pleased with my designs. It was hard to find time to write 500 word stories and then work design into it as well, so I left some of the pages to address announcements more than stories. (I’m ok with any point deductions for that).

I tried to use colors that were fun and girly, but some of them (the coal color for the last page, the title, and the text for page 3) had a very hard time showing up on the dropbox submission. It appeared white, which of course, is the opposite contrast color that I was going for. :/

Anyways, it might be helpful to let you know that the official colors for our sorority are brown and mode, our flower is the pink carnation and our symbol is the crescent moon. Thus, I chose to name my newsletter “The Carnation” and applied many of our symbols and themes throughout the project. I also tried to keep somewhat of a constant theme among all the color choices so I decided to apply dots to a number of the pages for alignment.

The first page was the easiest, because I chose to put a letter from the editor (me) about my experience with the sorority now that I am about to leave it. I chose to add a textured background and make it pink which I think turned out pretty well. The last page was pretty easy too. I went on the website to find ideas and found that they were calling members to register for the convention this summer. I took a screenshot of the Seattle design and then, after noticing the amount of twitter they were throwing at viewers, decided to screenshot some of those as well and add them to the margin. The middle two pages were the most difficult–mostly because I couldn’t figure out what to write about. I decided to go with an inspirational story I found in the sorority’s magazine about a freshman G Phi who paced first in a triathlon. Then I left the third page for upcoming announcements.

Originally posted at Brought to you by Brooke

Newsletter Assignment

By wesmoody in Assignment 3, BOOMER SOONER, Bowling, JMC 3433, JMC3433, Newsletter April 10, 2014

The latests project my class has been working on has been a newsletter. We had to find an organization we were interested in and make a newsletter about it. So basically we wrote three articles and created a layout for the organization.

This assignment was pretty tough. I wasn’t the article, but the layouts. I think it is hard to build it up in your head and even when you have a vision about what you want, it probably will change. I changed mine quite a bit, but I was happy with the outcome. Another thing that’s a little tough is deciding fonts. Since this was such a big body of work I wanted my headlines to reflect style but not be too crazy. The body of the articles I wanted to be easy on the eyes and clean. Here is a look at what I was able to come up with:

Newsletter

And here’s a look at my dummy layout, you’ll notice my final is nothing like the layout:

DummyLayout

For inspiration I searched numerous Pinterest boards and finally found one that I liked. I wanted my newsletter to look modern and not like the average newspaper look. So I found a magazine looking newsletter that had three columns instead of the traditional four. This was really challenging for me, but I liked how it turn out. Heres a look at my inspiration:

Here are the full versions of my stories:

The Future of OU Bowling

Student Spotlight

Types of Lanes

Hope you all enjoy!

-Tori

Originally posted at Tori Beechum - PR Pubs

Assignment 3: Newsletter

By wesmoody in Assignment 3, Assignments, JMC 3433 April 10, 2014

For assignment 3, we had to make a newsletter for an organization. I chose my sorority, Chi Omega, for my organization because I know so many events and activities taking place in Chi-O and have many connections to people in this organization. Also, I wanted to choose an organization that I cared about. When I started making this newsletter, I first made a dummy layout of how I wanted the newsletter to look. I started to search online to see if I could find examples of past Chi Omega newsletters to get some ideas. Although I didn’t find too many, I did get some good ideas of what I knew I did not want to do. I sketched a few ideas out an paper, but then put the ideas into action on InDesign.

First, I decided that I wanted to put a letter from our president on the first page to welcome alumni, family, friends, and others to our first newsletter. For this project, I specifically focused on staying inside the margins on all of the pages. Although I had looked at this on my previous projects, I wanted to make sure that it was a priority for this assignment. When placing everything inside the margins, it also made the layout very clear and understandable. All of the text and photos were aligned well, and were clearly spaced. I believe everything is organized well and easy to understand and comprehend.

When coming up with the overall design of my newsletter, I wanted to make sure that everything worked well together and was consistent. So I ended up using only two fonts and four colors throughout the entire project. This way, I used repetition and did not make the newsletter look cluttered by multiple colors and fonts. Additionally, I made sure everything looked proportional on the pages to create balance. My pictures were all appropriate sizes and always went along with the news story. Lastly, I believe that I have the correct amount of white space on all of my pages. The margins are kept white because it looks cleaner if nothing is outside the margins. Inside the margins, I believe I did a great job utilizing my space and making sure there is white space, but it is used appropriately. My main focus was to produce an appealing newsletter that was organized, clean, creative and easy/enjoyable to read, and I believe that my newsletter achieved all of these traits.

The main colors I used throughout this newsletter were black, red, yellow, and white. I chose red and yellow because every sorority has official colors, which for Chi-O are cardinal and straw (red and yellow). Additionally, I chose black because it helped offset the red and yellow and still helped bring a pop to the page. At first, I was worried about not having too many colors on my newsletter, but I think it looks cleaner with only four different colors. The background of the newsletter is white because it makes everything clear to read and the colors show up better on a white background.

For the typography, I chose a font that I downloaded from the Internet called Corneia. This font is a script style, and looks very distinguished and polished. When I first saw this font, I immediately thought that it fit the classy sorority style look I was going for, and it would connect to women and girls. For the news stories, I used a sans serif font called Sathu because it looked clean and easy to read. Another thing I focused on was to make sure all of the font sizes matched up in each section and align with each other.

Overall, I think this project went very well for me! I just decided that every class period, I would try to work on a new page of the project and get it done. I think this project was different from the others because although it required a lot of time to complete, more thought went into the original formatting of the newsletter. It was really nice creating a dummy layout because I was able to just immediately add my stories and pictures into the newsletter without having to create a textbox or a place to put my image. For the next project, I will definitely be making a layout on InDesign before and then add my ideas into the assignment. Personally, I feel like I have improved on InDesign again because I truly learn something new every time I come to class. I also think I have improved by the way I manage my time for this class. I know every project takes a while to complete, so I know that I have to schedule time into working on it in and out of class. I really enjoyed making this newsletter, and it might even have a possibility of being published by my sorority! Hopefully, this will work out and the Chi-O Chronicle will become a reality! Thank you to everyone who agreed to be a part of my newsletter! I appreciate your help. Below are the pictures of my newsletter:

Originally posted at Megan Young - Gaylord Student

By Grace Vojvoda in Assignments, JMC 3433 April 10, 2014

For this project I was to design a newsletter of an organization on campus. I choose the Undergraduate Anthropology Society (UAS). UAS is a club that meets weekly to discuss what is going in the Anthropology world. People are constantly bringing attention to new article that are posted. The club also hosts a variety of seminars with professors or people who work in the anthropology field.

The difficulties I faced in this project were finding interesting articles to put into the newsletter. Also trying to find upcoming events since the school year is almost over and there are very few.

I liked this project the best so far because I was able to work with an organization that I new well and it made designing feel easier. I’m the kind of person that will keep changing every little detail to see what looks the best, so even though I think this newsletter looks good, I would still go back and play around with the font more.

Front Page:

For the front page I included a controversial article because anthropologists love to debate over this particular topic. The other article is about an upcoming seminar on what to do with your anthropology degree, which will be incredibly helpful to those thinking about graduation. At the top I wanted to include some color, which I did with the strips of blue and the picture.

Page 2

Anthropologists care more about information, than having it split up with pictures. So Included a lot of writing in my newsletter to cater to the audience. I did split it up with shorter articles, and one picture, just so it wasn’t so bland. I choose three different types of font for the articles, one for the header, another for the deck and a different one for the article itself, to make it easier to discern them from each other.

Page 3:

Again, a lot of writing. I was trying to design for the target audience. I included the strips of blue to give a color break in the page and the picture I included is of great significance because it is one of the only complete skulls of its time.

Back Page:

I tried to make this back page fun and informational. Each paragraph is in a different font and some are a different size. I found the layout inspiration form Pinterest. The paragraphs are all of small little things to be aware of or things to think about applying to. They didn’t deserve full articles but were still important enough to include.

Overall this project was a good challenge in design. I took a lot of inspiration in design layout from Pinterest. I looked on the UAS Facebook page to see what articles people were discussing the most and found similar articles. In the future I would consider less writing and a few more pictures just to help break up all the writing.

Originally posted at Grace Vojvoda