Today I worked with Kyle Sparks, who is the Communications Manager and Writer at 8th Light. His role entails writing and editing proposals, copywriting for external and internal communication, and collaborating with Sales and Marketing departments.

We started the day by talking through the layout of The Weekly Bytes, an internal newsletter that shares information about important events, changes to processes or business structure, introductions to new and current employees and occasionally a spotlight on employees’ pets. Kyle had had some feedback that the current format of the newsletter could use some tweaking, so I spent some time working on it.

Structuring content is a nice challenge, and I thought not only about what I had learnt in the apprenticeship so far, but also about a book called Refactoring UI. I had to think about hierachy of information on the page and how I could make that visually clear to direct the reader’s attention sensibly. I also wanted to make sure that the newsletter didn’t look cluttered and that the reader could reach the important information quickly.

I also thought about what I wanted the newsletter to communicate in terms of design. I used a serif font for the titles to visually communicate the style of a newspaper, journal or article, and used a simple, sparse serif font for the paragraphs to ensure readability.

I split sections with dividing lines, and made sure each section title had less space between it and its paragraph than the divider atop. The reason for this was to show relationships and what “belonged” to what. This grouping not only helps to keep things visually “tidy” but also helps reading comprehension.

Considering responsiveness also became part of the challenge. As I was creating the layout on MailChimp’s editor, I was limited in what I could achieve. Column padding could not be altered in this editor to account for different screen widths, which lead to some annoying weirdness. There is a way to write your own code in MailChimp to create a layout, but unfortunately one needs to pay more for the ability.

Kyle and I also discussed how we could streamline and amalgamate internal communications at 8th Light. I help to write and manage the London specific newsletter, and Kyle writes and manages not only The Weekly Bytes (company wide), but also In The Loop, which is Chicago specific. As writing each of these newsletters can take considerable time and effort, combining some elements of the newsletters or sharing content could be quite useful.

Some ideas that we had were:

  • Sending all newsletters from same mailchimp account, so that all content, mailing lists and data analysis is in the same place. We can create tags for different offices within a larger mailing list.
  • Completing a standard template for Weekly Bytes. This is what I have been working on so far today.
  • Create a common template for the less formal newsletters, London Calling and In the Loop. It would be nice to have a template that is itself less formal and requires minimum effort for those inserting ocontent. This could also make it easier for the New York City and Los Angeles offices to start their own newsletters if they wanted to.
  • Having a common place to dump content, so that each office’s newsletter team can pick from pool, if relevant to them.

Today was super interesting to get a view of what goes on behind the scenes in the Communications part of the business, and I was excited to think about how we could bring some of this process to the London office. I really enjoyed working with Kyle. Tomorrow I will be working with Kevin Zolkiewicz, who is a Designer that specialises in implementation.