Dummy Layout – CVS Newsletter
Another week, another chance to improve my skills with InDesign for our new project in PR Pubs. For this week’s assignment we were asked to pick a fortune 500 company and design a newsletter for them. I looked at the list of companies and wanted to pick one that stood out to me based on character and community involvement, rather than popularity and stock figures. I decided on the CVS Health Corporation because this company has strong values it fights for and because of their community involvement.
To kick things off I went over to Pinterest and create a board of images that embodied my company. I wanted to make a board to get a broader picture of who makes CVS, both in terms of customers and employees. Likewise I went over to CVS.com and searched through their News Releases and articles in their “NewsRoom” in order to see how this company was making news. I was happy to see that CVS was delivering in vast amounts news article, but was also happy to see that these articles were grounded in volunteer and community work.
I had to review the video we watched earlier in the course to freshen up on Newsletter techniques, but once I started playing around with InDesign all the tools came back.
I created a title for CVS’s newsletter that I thought was fun and catchy, and started to go to work with adding in the article information I found on the company website. What I found most tedious, yet vitally important, was the font size of each heading and text. Figuring out how big certain items should be compared to others is critical with making sure the design looks nice and neat. This first article I got was pretty long, so to break up the words and draw attention I decided to use a pull-quote in the middle. I started to do this and forget, but remembered that Adam specifically had this in his tutorial for review. Thanks Adam! Also, I decided on a short index because I saw some peers include one and it really makes the newsletter flow and look good. Thanks peers!
Moving on to my second page I wanted to make the design a little different so I decided to bleed out a circle on the left edge of the screen. I feel like this design choice breaks up the page and accompany page, so that not so much white is apparent. I could not figure out how to get the text on the red circle though, so that will be something I need to look at so I can make a caption for my picture. I was happy that my space was limited on the page because it allowed me to insert a “jump article”.
For the next page I wanted to make sure I found an image that would really get people active. Finding this image was great, because it calls people to action by getting them active on social media. I had a lot of space on this page so using a pull quote again allowed me to fill-in what would be blank.
Lastly, my final page came together way better than I expected. I was really going to do three pages but once you get going you really cannot stop. I placed the ‘continued’ article on the side and aligned the texted accordingly. I also wanted to make sure it was distinct so I inserted a border which really makes both articles stand out. Not wanting the feature article on this page to be over shadowed, I mad sure to make the font bigger in comparison. Finishing things up, I saw that I still had some space so I inserted an image, that I cropped in PhotoShop, and kept moving things around until it fit.
I must say that I still need some work but I am happy to see that my skills and everything we are learning really is coming out looking like professional work.
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