Design "Creep"
My first makeover for the Dynamic Graphics Makeover issue [June/July 2006] is a newsletter—or more accurately a calendar—for a Church's youth program. It's currently two quarter-folded 11 x 17 sheets of paper printed both sides and mailed. The problem is the newsletter is confusing and hard to follow, largely because information is being repeated two and three times. Often this copy duplication happens because design "creep" sets in—someone picks up an existing piece and adds to it rather than rethinking and redesigning it.
Solving this specific problem was pretty straight forward though. First I read the entire newsletter—multiple times.
Second I asked questions until I was confident I understood the information, the audience, and the purpose. Finally I went online and did as much as research about calendars as I could.
While my final design isn't as clean as I'd prefer, I was able to remove the repetitious copy and design some standard formats and style sheets that in the end reduced the newsletter to one quarter-folded 11 x 17 sheet of paper.
In all fairness to the designer [who recognizes this] I don't think this newsletter suffered from design "creep' as much as program "creep". They expect this calendar to serve four different age groups that are divided into as many as four different "clubs"—a lot for any single calendar to accomplish successfully—but alas reorganizing the program was not part of my mission.
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