Reflection

At this point in the semester, we’re getting to the final stretch in our Public Relations Publications class. This week, we were asked to take the dummy layout that we completed last week and create the final draft of our newsletter. I was somewhat worried when it came to creating a newsletter. I was able to get through the process of creating a dummy layout, but I knew that this would be a lot more work and more of a process. I went into this week’s assignment with confidence that I would be able to work my way through this project based on what I had previously learned throughout the semester in InDesign. I believe that I responded in a way where I knew the work this week would be doable as long as I put in the time and effort.

When I began this project, I was in for a rude awakening, considering that I struggled a lot before finalizing my newsletter. I struggled to find news stories that would fit in the allotted space that I had dedicated in my dummy layout. I learned that I would need to reorganize my dummy layout in order to fir the stories and photos that I wanted to include in my newsletter. This project was definitely more time consuming that expected, but I tried to take this project slowly and calmly to make it the  best it could be in the end. I had to go through various websites to search for photos, though in the end, I was able to find most of my photos on the IBM website.

After struggling with this assignment, I found that ultimately, practice was the best tool for this project. The dummy layout helped a lot during this final project, but I learned that I had to change up my dummy layout some to fit all of the content that I had. I first reacted negatively when I was working on this project, but I found once I dedicated the time to this project, that I was able to be successful in my final newsletter.

I believe that I reacted the way I did initially, because I thought I would be able to complete this final newsletter in one sitting, which did not end up being the case. I found that it was better for me to take breaks in between pages of my newsletter in order to find articles and photos to go on each page of my newsletter, rather than overwhelming myself with doing it all at once.

I chose the content of my newsletter based on articles that I personally found interesting, which I hope that others my age would also find interesting. With a company like IBM, it is sometimes hard to target a younger age group, but I found after reviewing many different IBM articles, that I was able to locate ones that I was interested in.