LCA Newsletter mock up

Mockup print out of the Leeds College of Art newsletter; the idea was to actually make it in the format of a newsletter, therefore printed on newsprint with a size of just under A3, therefore when folded again it's at a decent size to post off and distribute.

Although the design's no where near completed, I just wanted to get what I had done already printed out to see what it's like in it's full scale and stock. I wasn't entirely sure with the direction so just wanted to check and get a feel of the direction it's heading so far. On a whole, the print out turned out ok, I would have preferred it if the stock worked better as this one seemed too thin for the ink to sit on properly, making some of the text difficult to read. I'm not sure on the tone of the paper either so will be testing other options soon. Also the crit's coming up so wanted to hear some feedback off people before I refine it in time for presenting it for real. From the mock up, I feel a lot more confident with the scale and format of it, the design was initially going to be an A2 folded in half to resemble a conventional newsletter format, but also printed an extra page that would slot in to illustrate how it can easily adapt to more information by adding additional pages. The design direction was quite simple; I wanted to make the logo quite prominent in the newsletter so made it the main focus with the diamond shape surrounding it to resemble an emblem shape. I used this shape as the central design direction, cropping images into diamond shapes and using diagonal lines to crop and separate text throughout. I chose to use a Pantone blue throughout, duotoning the images to keep it quite bold and also to resemble a blue print, which suggests an ongoing/ developing / unfinished copy. ( Whether or not this is good remains undecided! )

In terms of the technical specifications, I've kept it quite simple again, with the headers being Times New Roman Italic the the copy was Helvetica as required by the brief.  I am unsure about the diamond shaped images but overall layout seems feasible as it gives an ordered format yet it's relatively flexible with the potential content. Overall apart from the stock, I'm pretty pleased with the outcome of this, for something that I wanted to spend half a day working on, it has almost developed into a whole brief in itself as I want to spend more time on it revising several areas and developing a further range of materials and outcomes.