The time has come to tackle the back of the newsletter. The idea from the very beginning was to have the back of the newsletter be a poster so that people would keep it and put it up rather than read the newsletter once and then put it down or throw it away. Something aesthetically pleasing is way more likely to be kept.

I definitely wanted to use a photograph for the bag of the poster and I have no good images of around the university at the moment so I pulled a stock image of the view from the university out over Leeds from google just to have a play with. I used this image while I was still using the gold of the original newsletter design. Ignoring the dark stripe at the top of the page, that was me being an idiot and trying to match colours and failing spectacularly. Anyway. I just changed the image to a monotone using that one gold colour and in truth, it looks fairly vile and I can see why people think that it's a horrible colour. In small quantities, it's nice, but like this it's majorly overkill. The photograph just covering the whole A2 space looked ridiculous too. There is no white space whatsoever and it looks like it hasn't been thought about at all so this idea is going straight into the bin.

Another vexing point. The logo for the Leeds College of Art that we were given to use for this design is the most rubbish quality and awkward thing to work with ever. You have to go about 7 layers deep before you can even change the colour of the text and it's just far more complicated than it has to be.


I found this image of the front of the uni on the website and while it's only very small and low resolution, it'll be fine simply for a proposal, which is all my newsletter is.


I used the purple and the gold of the design of my newsletter this time. While I decided that using a full page photograph really wasn't work, I decided to utilize the white space of the back of the newsletter and used the photograph in a circular shape and changed it to a monotone of the purple spot colour. This worked much better in the way that the newsletter folded down. The circle photograph can't even be seen once it's been folded down, and the text at the top of the poster makes up the front and the back covers of the newsletter whilst in it's folded state. I just need to get this printed in the digital dungeon and then I can get some product shots of it.

As said in the crit, the gold colour wasn't really working and didn't appear to be the most appealing colour so I went back to the design and had a bit of play with the colours, trying to keep it 1 colour + black + stock. I just went through a few colours that I quite liked rather than go mad with them







This burgundy one was actually the most popular with all of the people that I showed it to. I didn't just show people the colour online, I printed out samples on the laser printer, which of course didn't get the colours quite right - it never does - but it was enough to get the point across. The general consensus was that it was a very rich and high quality looking colour.



The purple returns! Though it's definitely a better purple this time, it's much darker and definitely more of a 'royal purple' colour. Instead of just one colour here, I kept the gold from the first design as the little page break lines at the bottom of each section to offset the purple. The purple and gold go really well together and definitely give a feel of royalty and high standard. The purple went down well amongst those I showed it to. The darker colour behind the white title text makes it stand out much better than it did before with the gold colour.

Obviously the laser printer killed the colours entirely but I am looking forward to seeing how it will print downstairs in the digital dungeon.

Just an image of what I designed for the newsletter laid out flat. It's a fairly straight forward layout, everything is divvied up into sections and it's clearly laid out.

After the design sheets for this newsletter, I pretty much just stopped drawing and started playing with folding techniques for it instead. For as creative as we all are, I figured that at the end of the day, it's still the marketing team that is going to be choosing this, so I figured I would keep the design a little more corporate than not. So in light of this, I wanted to make the folding technique a little bit more interesting. My main idea for this is a sort of staggered concertina fold.

This one was just a sheet of A3 paper folded down into an A5 square. The size that I'm going for with this newsletter is A2, but I didn't really have any to hand. I just wanted to see the rough size that it was folded down, as this is something that needs to be mailable and easy to handle.


This was folded in half length ways and then folded into a staggered concertina. The result felt quite thing and had a tendency to keep springing open so it didn't fold down quite so well. Obviously, this is cartridge paper and it's quite thick so therein may lie the error of these mock ups, but hey.





Pop open! oh no!

The fold below I much prefer, I folded it into a staggered concertina first and then folded it in half. This way it folds down much better and doesn't spring open. The benefit of this too is that there are no staggered edges on the outside for anything to catch on, if that makes sense. It will slide into an envelope much better.






The design on screen. I decided to go with the gold that was used on the college prospectuses and promotional material this year (Designed by this is workshop, former students). It looked quite nice on screen. The brief specified that it wanted limited colours, so I went with one colour (gold) + black + stock. I pulled all of the content off the college website rather than used Lorem Ipsum. I dropped all the images in and converted them to grayscale. This is the first time that I've really designed anything like this and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. So far anyway. Now I have to worry about the back of the newsletter, which I want to be a poster of some description with the open days listed.


I printed this out at A3 on the laser printer, so it's pretty bad quality but in truth I merely wanted to test that it folded down okay and that my layout worked. It did! Hurrah! It lined up just right, which is a first for me to get it right first time. The laser printer made a complete hash up of the colour as well and it was pointed out in the crit that it wasn't the nicest colour in the world anyway and that I should have a bit of a think about it. The fold technique went down really well in the crit and people seemed to approve.






Held up by the lovely Becca. Obviously, it would be printed at A2, and this is just a tester.