16/3/16 - Designing

My third day in the office involved beginning the project my end goal is for the two-week placement: an impact report for the charity for the financial year 2015/16.

To do this, I relied on my skills gained from my experience as Culture Editor for Newcastle University's student newspaper, The Courier. I have held this role from the beginning of this academic year, and have worked for the newspaper throughout my entire university studies.

My abilities on Adobe InDesign and Photoshop have been extremely useful in thinking about creating the impact report. However, I have had to always keep in mind the different nature of the publication: The Courier is targeted at students, and so we are usually able to write in an informal, humorous style. The impact report I am creating on this project has to maintain a professional tone at all times, and extra detail must be placed on ensuring images are of the highest quality and always relevant. This is why I spent the first few hours of this morning proof-reading what I had written so far for the report, correcting any grammar mistakes, and adding extra detail that I have learned throughout the research process, along the way.

To source the images, I had to liaise with the communications team at Changing Lives to ensure all images I used were from the financial year the report is based on. I also used my initiative to design the template for each page, and the content page, using the colour scheme present in previous publicity literature from the company. 

I made good progress on the report today, completing 15 pages of the report. To complete the report (which I anticipate I will do on Friday) I now need to create unique infographics based on the statistics I collated at the beginning of the week. I will then be able to simply place these in the white space I have left for them, and then send the report to Rhiannon for approval. 

The statistics I will be making these infographics from are representative of April 2015-January 2016. When designing these infographics, then, I will be mindful that these statistics are likely to change as the figures for the last few months of the financial year are collated and released. I will therefore ensure they are easily editable, so I can liaise with the communications team at Changing Lives in the following months to update the impact report before its release to the public.