Planning the Project

The newsletter you will create in this project can be delivered in a variety of ways. It serves an internal communications purpose, but it could also be used to acquaint a potential customer with your company or acquaint investors to your company culture. Obviously, you will construct your company newsletter with your primary customers in mind: your fellow employees.

You need to consider not only content, but also style. A company newsletter is often the primary way a company communicates a lot of information all at once. It can also be placed on the company intranet, or portions can be doled out via email.

The newsletter you will construct will deliver information on all aspects of your company, but feel free to adapt your template to content that is most appropriate for your company. I have included information from HR, sales and marketing; product development and engineering; the president or CEO; and important dates and reminders.

Remember that, when developing your newsletter, it is more than likely a repeat publication. You should therefore develop a format with icons that are readily recognizable, a format and icons that give it character and that are unique to your company and this publication. So, in addition to logos, you will probably use the library you created for your brochure project. Additionally, in this chapter, we will cover the new feature of InDesign CS2object styles. Object styles, like all saved styles, give your publication consistency of formatted elements throughout. Whether you use libraries or object styles, both features assist you in developing consistent looking objects throughout your publication. Because different areas in the newsletter are devoted to different departments, you will likely be working with contributing writers for the newsletter. You will have to work with these contributors to ensure that you receive appropriate text files.

Note

You will have a couple of choices for this project. You can use the Fill with Placeholder Text command, or you can ignore those steps, opting to import a text file and formatting them with the style sheets you will develop. We will discuss the unique steps you have to take to clean up imported text.

Production Choices

Depending on the number of newsletters and your available internal output devices, you might consider producing this piece in-house. If you have a device capable of folding and stapling, this eight-page newsletter could be accomplished by printing on two tabloid-size pages, folded in half and stapled. I have deliberately avoided bleeding elements so that it could be produced in-house. Be mindful of the fact that, if you choose to print this in-house as suggested, you will have to rearrange your pages into printers pairs so they print in the correct sequence for binding.

In addition, you can export this document out as a PDF and give it to your webmaster to post on your company intranet. If this is the case, consider some navigational elements for the recipients (for example, hyperlinks for moving through the document).

Although the project you will construct assumes in-house digital, keep your color expectations realistic. If you'll be distributing it via PDF, there's no telling how your newsletter might be read or printed, but more than likely it will be grayscale. If you're producing it with a commercial printer and budget is a consideration, reduce your layout to two colors.

Distribution Choices

Odds are, this will be delivered via internal mail, the least expensive of your hard copy options. If this is to be mailed via the USPS, I have provided guidance for a self-mailer with a data merge on the back self-cover. Again, if this is to be distributed via PDF, keep your resolution set to 72ppi (small file size and low-quality output); however, if it is to be printed by the recipient, laser (print, not press) quality should be sufficient.

Stock, Binding, and Finishing

Your paper choice should fold and staple easily. Remember that a coated stock makes colors more vibrant. To keep things simple, don't place images through the fold.