After an eventful week, even outside of PR pubs, reflecting on this assignment really feels good. We were asked to pick a fortune 500 company, and create a fake newsletter for that organization. I elected to go with Hershey’s Chocolate. Sweet decision, I know. Before creating an actual newsletter, we were charged with designing our dummy layout. This skeleton guides the remainder of the project and acts as the roughest rough draft possible to create.
As we began working, I found it really hard to not get started implementing content into my dummy layout. I’m a person who just really wants to dive in deep and get to work. Despite that specific struggle, I was proud of the approach I took to my design. It was traditional looking to fit the mold of the Hershey’s “classic American” brand, but I added curves and sharp angles to create the contrast found in a most modern-style newsletters.
I think the dummy layout goes a lot into helping you plan for the actual content draft. You look and see how things fit together, and you’re able to decide how long stories will be and what pages stories will fit on. I worked for a newspaper in high school doing page design and this brought me back to those days, for sure!
Going forward, I’m excited to implement the skeleton and actually begin to place content into the layout I’ve constructed!
