Project Details
The quarterly Montage membership newsletter began approximately two years ago. As time went on, we began to realize how inflexible the original structure was. We had to constantly cut content from our plans, it took too long to customize, and it produced an equally limited interactive PDF we used as a digital content option on our website. We realized that we could do better if we changed the structure of the project, so we set out to find the best way to do that.
Challenges
The main challenge with the print edition of this project was that we needed to make various upgrades to production all while maintaining the current budget. Increases in production costs were unavoidable if we wanted to achieve our vision, so we had to get creative with other aspects of the project. As for the digital edition, we knew that an interactive PDF – even an interactive one – wasn’t the ideal way to distribute our content online. We knew the answer lied within the new company website and all of its tools now at our disposal, but we had never tackled a problem like this before and had to come up with a totally new solution.
Applications
By designing the upgrades of the print edition around the end goal of folding the final project for mailing – which would end up saving us around 50% of postage costs – we were able to scale up the page size by a few inches, add four more pages, and print the project on new stock. The print publication is now larger, and we have plenty of room to expand our content. The design was completely reworked to be much more open, with a more refined color palette and use of neutrals to keep customization easy. A matte stock ensures even large blocks of text in our articles are easy to read. For the digital edition, we designed a landing page on the newly updated company website to house posted articles directly from our print edition. This new way of disseminating the information is easier for us to post and much friendlier for readers to use. It also allows us to create archives of all issues online that can be easily referred to in the future.