Page Layout Reworks:

Page layouts are central to many communities and the groups within them. Why? Newsletters. Newsletters are often the lifeblood of their communication efforts with their members and often one of the greatest investments of time and limited resources that they have.

A good newsletter not only communicates clearly the group's messages from "Why we are important" to "Please come and support the local pancake breakfast" these messages though meaningless to most are of the utmost importance to these groups otherwise they would not take the time to build such newsletters. There is no luxury of just filling space for the sake of filling space. Additionally, newsletters are often the only tangible link many individuals have to show any proof of membership or a link to the community that produces them. Especially as a presence on a group board is at best ephemeral or abstract.

I like reworking newsletters. They provide a lot of challenges. Knowing that they need to be consistent in message, and requires branding and planning for their master pages, their text choices, the display of common elements, as well as font choices. At the same time, it has to be interesting. I like recognizing that  I only have this project for a few hours. Those committed to producing these newsletters would be using what I created would be faced with my choices for months if not years on end and so the choices need to be easy to use, yet fit their brand, and still look good.

So I challenge myself to keep the theme and appearance as recognizable to the original. Not create something new, but simply reworked. Perhaps the greatest draw to this type of exercise is dissecting the original PDF and reworking the elements so that I can then reuse them.

Some very challenging text and photo manipulation problems have come from my reworking of a newsletter PDF.

Original on the Left - Rework on the Right - Exercise in making each text block 1, 2, and 3 column with the most text heavy elements having more columns and subsequently a smaller amount of overall working space to put the copy.

Original on the Left - Rework on the Right