Newsletter Assignment

Spenser Hicks

This was definitely the most extensive and therefore the most challenging assignment thus far. There was a lot to think about before delving into this and I really think I learned a lot about planning and designing a whole newsletter for an organization.

I first planned out the colors I was going to use and that was pretty easy seeing as Sigma Chi goes with colors blues, old gold and black to represent them. I wanted to use these colors throughout but in different ways to show some contrast. I put the colors in different places on each page in order to get this effect.

The design is pretty simple overall but I think it gets the message across well. Fraternity brothers are not going to want some flashing design that might come off to “girly” to them. They want something simple that tells them what they need to know about the chapter and I think that’s exactly what this does.

I decided on articles that would be relevant to the active brothers by being stuff that they would actually care about such as rush and date party information. I think it is well organized and has a good flow throughout the whole document. It wasn’t easy but I think I managed to capture the simplicity the organization would want as well as correctly use repetition and contrast of color. This was a very interesting and challenging assignment that I learned a lot from. I have started to better develop my use of design and many of the elements such as contrast and

Originally posted at Spenser Hicks's Blog

This assignment in my PR Publications class was to make a Newsletter for a certain organization. I chose to use the non profit I am an intern for again, like I did with my business card and letterhead.

Since City Care is a non profit I really felt like they would benefit from a donor newsletter, but not enough big things happen every month so I decided to make it an annual one. It would be just a nice reminder of what their donations did through out the year and serve as a reminder to donate again at the start of the next one.

Here is the design I created:

With this design I wanted to put in the city scape that is in the City Care logo to keep up the repetition so all of their documents look and feel the same. I kept it simple with a navy blue box at the top to off set all the white and keep the color scheme the same with the city scape. I also repeated it in the pull quote box so that it stood out more.

I chose to only break up one story so that the newsletter would be easy to read and the reader wouldn’t have to flip back and forth. I also have two shorter stories so that the newsletter didn’t feel like it would be a marathon just to read through it.

I was pretty limited with the pictures and people I could use because there are privacy laws when dealing with people that are receiving government or nonprofit help. But all the ones I used are approved. I was lucky that all my pictures went with the stories I wrote.

The hardest par for me with this assignment was all the writing. I couldn’t decide where I wanted all the stories or how I wanted them to flow. It took so tweaking here and there but i think the newsletter is very readable. My call to action is on the last page where I ask readers to follow us on social media. Since I am the social media intern and City Care is new to the social media world it is important that we build our following right now.

All in all I am happy with the way this assignment turned out. I learned a lot about working with text in this assignment, which I have always struggled with in inDesign.

Originally posted at Mary Morton- PR Publications Course