Work Based Learning: DMA Project

Fastpitch Softball Media Guide

Project Overview

The Digital Media Arts team was asked to produce the Cerro Coso Coyote Fastpitch Softball Media Guide. The Media Guide is used as a marketing, recruitment, and souvenir program by head coach Melvin Jenkins. This is the first year Cerro Coso has had a girls Fastpitch Softball team and Coach Jenkins was eager to have a quality program for dispensing to players and potential recruits for future teams. Interns Bryan Leonard and Patrick Clark were responsible for the creation of the brochure.

The software package Adobe Pagemaker 6.5 was used to build the Media Guide. Pagemaker, a powerful desktop publishing tool makes creating multi-page publications and booklets an easy task. Pagemaker is also a common software used by many print houses and therefore it is easily accommodated to output to print. In fact, this was an in-house print project to be produced by the Cerro Coso Printshop. The process of printing usually takes two to three weeks for runs of considerable size, such as the media guide was with 300 copies total.

The Cover

The design idea behind the cover was to create an image that appeared to be items upon a desk, or items laying on top of a newspaper. It was determined in the pre-production phase of the design process that the theme for the media guide would be based upon the design of an average newspaper. To carry the theme over to the cover, the look of newspapers using team images and articles was used. To create the layered look and give depth to the cover, drop shadows and variations in contrast and sharpness were utilized.

This is the final completed cover for the Fastpitch Softball Media Guide.

Media Guide cover Media Guide back

The Contents

picture of contents As mentioned earlier the main design theme set forth in the pre-production phase was that of a newspaper. To carry this theme over articles and page headers were set up much like that of a real newspaper. Creative freedom was allowed for pages that did not readily fit into this layout, while doing as much as possible to maintain the newspaper theme.

Page templates were designed and then used to ensure design consistency throughout the media. Font sizes and types were chosen before production began to also maintain consistency. Since the entire contents of the media were to be black and white, color was not a concern. However, some contrast considerations needed to be accommodated as the output print result tended to darken images and photographs by ten percent, and therefore the images were lightened before printing to allow for this. It is very easy to be deceived by what appears on the screen as what truly matters is what comes out of the printer.

Production

Here are some of the layouts and samples of completed pages used in the media guide. Common newspaper section headlines were used to divide up the media guide into content sections. 'Government' was the Cerro Coso and Athletics administration, 'Human Interest' was the team members, while 'Classifieds' were the advertisements used to support the production of the media guide.

page spread 1 page spread 2