Amy Abatangle

Here’s an example of a current volunteer project. I produce the monthly newsletter for a local mothers’ club of which I am a member. The newsletter runs between 20 and 28 pages and circulates to 900+ women in both digital and print format. I took over in October of 2007 and will end my run in September of this year.

BEFORE: April 2007

My design goal was to, in a word, simplify. The newsletter had been produced in black & white for print and spot color for the PDF format. I designed around our printing constraints; namely, the newsletter is printed on 11×17 copy paper by a repro shop, folded in half and mailed. I chose to eliminate spot color (since it wasn’t reproduced in print) and instead use screens. I reined in the clip art, stuck to a couple of fonts, and focused on making information easy to locate by keeping sections consistent and page layout as clean as possible.

AFTER: April 2008

Before this project, I hadn’t worked in print since I published an undergraduate literary magazine using Pagemaker in 1993. Adobe InDesign is wonderful to use, and I’m enjoying learning the flexibility of the application.