Newsletter Final Reflection

1. What were you asked to do?

I was asked to finish working on the dummy newsletter draft that I created the previous week. We were supposed to fill in our placeholder elements with real stories and images that would fit in our company’s newsletter. To do this the right way we had to decide who our public for the newsletter was- I chose to make mine an internal newsletter for American Airlines employees.

2. How did you respond to what you were asked to do?

I had already started putting in real stories last week, so I just worked on adding the last one of the four and then did some other final touches on the decks, captions, pull quotes, etc. I also struggled to find the last image for my last article, since the article itself lacked one. I was excited to work some more on the newsletter because I thought it was really cool to create this big project from originally nothing. I am kind of slow when it comes to creating things like this so I knew I would need to hunker down in the computer lab for a couple of hours to work on it.

3. How did react to what you actually did?

After spending way more time than I thought it would originally take, I finally finished the newsletter for American Airlines internal publics. I found it very tedious work to make sure every little font size, color, alignment, and detail was the same between each page. I also struggled with keeping a common identifying element across all the pages, but I finally got it with the blue faded bar across the top of the pages. As well as this I put the little AA icon in the corner by each page number. When I took a step back to look at my final product I was pretty proud of myself for how it turned out.

4. Now go one level deeper: Why do you think your reaction was what it was?

I was proud of myself in the end because I had spent a lot of time on the project, and also because what I envisioned in the beginning had come to life on the document. I can remember in the first week or two of class when we did the newsletter for a candy company to learn In Design I was so overwhelmed by all of the elements, and still when starting this project I felt that way. But thankfully, it got easier and more manageable as I went on. InDesign itself isn’t nearly as intimidating anymore, I actually feel like I have a really good handle on how to do quite a few things.

5. How did your target public affect your overall content and design strategy?

My target public did not necessarily affect the design of my newsletter, but it had a major affect on the content. When designing for an internal public I had to choose stories and headlines that would make the employees want to read it- that meant things like position changes, product or service changes, landmark events, record numbers or sales, policy changes, etc. I kept this is mind when choosing stories and found that the ones that worked for this were much longer than the stories I would have chosen for an external audience.

Here is the PDF rendering of my final internal newsletter for American Airlines- AmericanAirlines