Document and Graphic Design:

Willow Valley Middle School College Preparation Brochure

This brochure was part of a group project in a Document Design course that focused heavily on the role of social justice in technical communication. My three-person team worked with an AmeriCorps representative who was working in Willow Valley Middle School (for 6^th and 7^th graders), located in Wellsville, Utah. This school has a varied student body, many of them from lower income or minority families.

The group project required us to create five different types of documents that would aid the school’s counseling center. This brochure was to be used to entice students and their parents to start thinking early about the goal of attending college.

The brochure’s design was impeded by the fact that all the information the client wanted to highlight had to fit on a two-sided 8.5” x 11” paper, including the large “Utah Admissions Index” table, which would not fit neatly within a standard 3-fold brochure format. As my team and I brainstormed ideas for each of the different documents, I conceived the concept of “opening doors to your future,” with the non-traditional design of the brochure opening like a set of double doors. Formatting the document in this manner allowed the ideal placement of the table by itself on the back panel of the brochure and allowed the other, more-related information to fit on the inside panels of the brochure. Since I had come up with the idea and knew the vision I wanted to create, I worked solo on this portion of the project.

Tools I used in the project included photography, as I found and photographed a set of doors on campus that would work with my vision for the brochure. Adobe Photoshop was used for some minor color correction and cropping of the original photo. Copyediting skills were used in reducing wordiness from the original text given to me to make the information concise and easy to understand for students and their parents from a wide variety of academic backgrounds. The font used for the subheads was specifically chosen for its informal yet “school-ish” feel, again making it accessible not just to the parents but also to the students. The brochure itself was created using Adobe InDesign. The non-traditional design was challenging in that the photo and text for the cover layout had to be divided into two opposing parts in order to fit together after the brochures were printed and folded.