just over a year ago i worked with a group of digital arts students at the university of hull scarborough campus to develop ideas for the much needed revamp of scarborough’s urban renaissance newsletter. nick and linda at renaissance had been doing a great job compiling the newsletter themselves that kept people connected but it was time to move to the next level and produce something that also reflected renaissance aims of quality design. we ran a creative session at the town team meeting which received very favourable comments and from the work created that night the students did a great job with an A2 folding to A4 design featuring a map of current renaissance projects as a centrespread. they presented to the town team who loved it. and then it all went quiet…

…fast forward 12 months and finally the newsletter has a sponsor (TourismFirst) and the budget to produce something of quality. so we sat down with nick and ruth (head of marketing at sbc) to look at first forming an editorial policy that would steer the publications future direction. some fairly brutal but necessary decisions were taken, plus since the initial design the new postage charges have been introduced we also had to reconfigure the design to A5 which folds out to A2. i have to confess to a little bullying of nick to get this moving again as there was some resistance to change when he announced the intention to the town team (maybe they’d forgotten last year’s presentation?). but the opportunity is too good to waste and i’m grateful for him and linda trusting me on this. now we’ll wait and see what everyone else thinks - it will be hitting doormats and leaflet racks over the next couple of days.

newsletters are often rather dull and so the temptation when designing one is to indulge yourself with a radical graphic approach, but the main aim of this publication is to communicate in a confident and enthusiastic way, not dazzle with clever typography. and so the design is colourful but straightforward, hopefully achieving a happy compromise between making an impression and yet making people feel it’s their newsletter and they are involved. the new format actually costs half as much to print as the previous booklet style and yet has the same number of pages and, i’d suggest, a hundred times the impact. the design takes the colourcoding from the renaissance website to identify the regular content such as minutes and reports, the folding format allows a great deal of flexibility in reporting on events and projects or introducing special features or even using the centrespread as a poster. i’m looking forward to developing it over the coming months and continuing to involve any students who are around in the process.