The past few weeks of my Public Relations Publications course have been focused on developing a business card and letterhead for a company or organization of our choice. I chose to do Campus Activities Council at OU for my organization because it is on in which I am involved with and I am passionate about their values

I was very excited to get into InDesign and start playing around with my design, but there were a few steps we completed before creating our design.

We started by researching our company and locating their logo. When I was asked to do this, I thought it was a little silly considering I already knew a lot about my organization. To my surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about the values and history of CAC. During my research I found that Campus Activities Council’s mission is to build leaders, build community and in return create a lastly legacy on this campus. They are responsible for presenting campus-wide events and traditions for all students. As an organization, they initiate and implement quality campus-wide programs throughout the academic school year to all facets of campus life. Though these events, they bring people together and create lasting and meaningful relationship among students and faculty. Because of this I wanted my designs to resemble involvement, togetherness and brightness while all being informative and welcoming to students. I wanted my business card to provoke students to want to visit my office eager to learn more and a desire to get involved. In addition, we also created Pinterest boards for inspiration to help us get started. I feel looking up other business card designs really helped me get started.

It was finally time to get into InDesign! As I have said before, I am not new to InDesign… but definitely very rusty. It didn’t take long for me to start getting the hang of things again and I was on my way. When making my business card I found myself creating many different versions of a similar design until I finally came to something I loved. To my surprise, the front of my business card (which is my favorite part) came together fairly easily. The back was something that I had difficulties perfecting. It wasn’t until I received feedback from my classmates and my professor that I finally moved things around enough, changed some fonts, and switches some colors to way that looked so much better than before.

For my letterhead, I used the same elements of my business card to make them work for a letterhead. For example I used the same saying and fonts I just made them a little smaller and rotated them. At the bottom I included “@OUCAC” because that is where you can locate all of their social networking sites. Overall, I wanted to keep this design simple, clean and easy to print and send.

Right now I do not have any plans to pitch my design to my organization, but I do think it would be something to consider in the future, once I receive more feedback.

This project definitely made me feel more comfortable in InDesign again. I learn best through trial and error and this assignment helped me familiarize myself with the tools of InDesign by actually doing something myself.

If I were to start over on this project, I wouldn’t change much about my design. Of course there is always room for minor changes and improvements, but I am proud of what I have created. The only thing I think I would like to play around with more is the back of my business card because it is something that I still don’t feel completely comfortable with. I love the front so much and I hope that with more practice I can get the back to be something I love equally as much.

Dear future students, when completing this project…. don’t get frustrated. Its a new program and it will take time to get used to the tools, let alone feel comfortable creating a design from scratch. Just take your time during the research phase to really get your creative juices flowing and in no time your will have a design you love too.

**video to come**