The Brochure Assignment

Your assignment is to create a booklet or brochure for an actual organization. You should choose a document
that will have a useful life of at least six months. This may require some research. You may design a booklet
(at least eight 5 1/2"x 8 1/2" pages), a trifold brochure (letter size), or a four-fold brochure (legal size). The
document must be designed to be printed front and back. Text or visuals must appear on every page or fold.
Visuals are expected -- at a minimum, an organizational logo should appear.

Computing Skills
You should all gain at least some additional experience with InDesign, and perhaps with scanning and editing
graphics as well.

Documents
To successfully complete this assignment, you will be required to turn in the following documents:

• Project Planning Memo

• Mock-up of brochure
• Brochure and Project Assessment Memo

Project Planning Memo
This memo should outline in some detail what you see as the objectives for the project in terms of both docu-
ment design and computing goals. You should consider your personal goals, the goals that I as instructor
have for you, and goals that the organization you are writing for may hold. For example:

Document Design Computing

My Personal Goals Trifold w/ header learn more InDesign,

use gray for color learn Scaling in PhotoShop
set up a stylesheet scan line art and photo images

Instructor's Goals brochure use InDesign or comparable page

for Me last 6 months layout software
etc.

Organization's Goals low printing cost (no color?) high quality photographs
mail distribution
ready by July

Document Mock-Up
A mock-up is simply a "model" of the document that you are planning, in the same way a blueprint is a model
of a building under construction. It is one step beyond an outline. To make a mock up, take a sample blank
page (or pages), fold them as the final document will appear, and physically block out areas on the page for
each proposed heading, visual, and block of text. Later, as sections of text are composed and printed, they
can be electronically pasted onto the mock-up until it becomes a completed draft. For your initial assignment,
you need only appropriately sized pages and blocks indicating the size and placement of columns, headings,
and graphics. This is not a graded document, but is required.
Project Assessment Memo
As always, you are expected to turn in a project assessment memo with your final draft of the assignment.
This should address the concerns of the primary audience (the organization the brochure is composed for),
the secondary audience (to whom will the organization distribute the brochure and how?), the reading en-
vironment, the document design decisions, and the computer-aids used to produce it. The point is to show
you had a clear, well thought-out approach to each phase of the assignment, even if it means explaining why
something failed and how you would correct it if you had time. While the assessment memo is not graded
itself, the completeness of the contents invariably affects my evaluation of the document it accompanies.