Overview
The monthly Pregnancy Helpline Volunteer Newsletters had previously been plain text sent in an email with hard to distinguish headers.
As a volunteer, I had trouble picking out the information I was most interested in and couldn’t get a sense of progress or stats since the last newsletter without reading closely.
I transferred their newsletters into MailChimp, created a template layout and images to display stats in a visually appealing way for the Volunteer Newsletter. Later on, I created a distinct, but complimentary template for the General Newsletter, which goes out to a wider audience.
Process
The newsletters were refined throughout multiple months of newsletters, with tweaks here and there to improve it. This summarizes my process in arriving at the most recent version of the newsletter, including lessons learned.
Stylesheets
The old newsletter was solely black text, so one of the first pieces to design was how to use color. I wanted to use the general color scheme of the Pregnancy Helpline with a bolder feel.
The softer colors, which are fine on the website, did not come across well when it came to font colors and break lines. I darkened the blues and made the green richer to widen its use cases. Here is the bolder version I created for the newsletters:
I applied the blues to the headers and used the greens as accent colors in images and buttons. The sections of the newsletter were updates about each program from the program coordinator, which we indicated with H1 and H2 styles.
Icons
Each program has monthly statistics that are highlighted in each section. I initially created images with the numbers as part of the image, but that caused two problems:
- It was more difficult to update month-to-month, especially for other users.
- The information in the image was not accessibility-friendly.
I removed the statistics from the images for each program and instead put the statistics in the “Display Text” format next to the pictures.
General Newsletter
The second goal of this project was to create a second distinct yet complimentary newsletters. Most volunteers receive both newsletters, so it was important to be able to tell them apart quickly and highlight the information in a different way.
For the General Newsletter, I kept the same stylesheet, but adjusted the use of it in order to create a distinct feel.
