Update on the Web Flyer

Sarah here!

Last week, we completed our e-newsletter masthead. What, you may ask, is that? That's the first thing you see when an e-newsletter is emailed to you: something consistent and visually appealing to start the newsletter.

This was yet another component of our class assignment, so we put one together to go along with everything else we have completed. As you can see, the header there is very similar to our blog header here. We wanted to keep these the same, so viewers could easily connect the newsletter and blog and know they are part of the same marketing scheme. We chose to keep the layout of this very simple so as to not overwhelm viewers. The design aspect was simple and very easy for us to put together, but nothing is ever easy, now is it?

When it came to putting the header in an email, we had all sorts of problems. Technological troubles seems to be a common theme with our project. Our first issue was finding an email provider that would allow us to send HTML-based emails. We have a Gmail account for this blog, and wanted to use that, but Gmail, unfortunately, does not allow sending HTML-based emails. We then tried using a Hotmail account, which will send HTML-based emails. When we attempted that, however, the formatting was incorrect. So after several attempts at tweaking the HTML coding, we gave up on Hotmail and decided to switch to a non-web-based email provider. This time we tried Thunderbird, Firefox's email client. This allows us to send HTML-based emails disguised as our Gmail account. Problem solved!

Luckily, now that we're beyond the technical issues, we are pretty much finished with the web flyer. Now our focus is on fine-tuning and tweaking the various components of our project, focusing primarily on the book trailer.

That's all for now; we'll keep you updated as we finish this project in time for finals week next week!

Signing off,
Sarah

Design Updates

Posted by Sarah:

Hello, everybody! Alice, Lindsay and I have been working the last week or so on creating a flyer and an e-newsletter masthead for Janna to use to promote The Motion of the Ocean.

We're not finished yet, but here are the works in progress! We started with something very simple for the flyer. We included a photo of Janna, a photo of the book cover, and a bio of Janna. For decoration, I made up some little waves, which we liked and later ended up using for the e-newsletter masthead, as well. However, we didn't like the poster on a white background, and we could not find a color that we were satisfied with. So we decided to take the photograph from the cover of the book and Photoshop it, allowing us to use the picture as our flyer background.

Janna was kind enough to send me the original photograph, and I Photoshopped the image to add quite a bit more sky to it. Lindsay and Alice provided me with their keen eyes to ensure that no blemishes were in the Photoshop job. We re-did the flyer, eliminating the fun waves in this version. We rather like it, but it is not yet finished. When we presented the flyer to the rest of the class, the common complaint was that it did not look like it was advertising a book. We haven't quite determined what we want to change about this in order to complete our flyer, but the three of us will be meeting this evening to finish. I will post that as soon as I am able!

Lastly, we have our e-newsletter masthead, which I love the most. It is simple, clean, and very visually appealing. This version here is incomplete: it still needs information about the blog and a picture for the blog. However, you get the gist of it.

Our next big project is to create a book trailer video, which I think we all are very excited about! Stay tuned right here to see every exciting thing we are working on!

Don't forget! May 6th, Janna will be appearing at the Garfield Book Company. Stay tuned for details!

Signing off,
Sarah Wise