Week 12 Reflection

We’re winding down on the fourth design project already. For some reason, the time seemed to get away from me more than usual on this one. I had to spend by far the most time outside of class on this assignment. I think part is that is due to the fact that as the semester progresses, we’re allocated less and less time to do things, which I understand. It’s also a crazy point in the semester so I’m sure that plays in as well.

For our fourth design project, we were asked to choose a Fortune 500 company and create a newsletter for them. This newsletter was required to be four stories and three pages minimum. More specific requirements included a headline, a deck, a byline, a photo, and a photo caption for every article along with one pull quote, one jump article, and one article with subheads.

As I already mentioned, I’m not sure where my time went or why I fell behind (am I behind? are other people ahead?), but I carved out the time to come and make up for my slow-going start. I chose Mondelez International for my company and I started by designing a dummy layout. This layout did help as a starting point, but as I moved on to actually inserting articles and images, I got a little frustrated with it. I guess I wanted my newsletter to be more ‘fun’, but I never really found a way to balance fun with all the other requirements we had to have.

I think I felt like this because in my eyes, this was the most restrictive project we’ve had so far. In terms of requirements, this project had the most moving parts. I also ended up feeling a little restricted by my dummy layout, which I know I could have completely revamped, but I didn’t feel like I had the time to do that. I was satisfied with my final product, but not wowed.

I chose an external audience as my target public. The content I included was positive and much of it promoted new products or new ideas that could potentially impress a consumer. I also tried to use more colors and large pictures because I think an external audience would need to be drawn in more than an internal audience would.