Schools Outreach Brochure 2006

The Schools Outreach Brochure is a brochure/newsletter reviewing the schools outreach activities undertaken by the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton. It is mailed to over 2,500 schools across the south of England and forms a major part of the University's marketing and recruitment strategy for the Faculty of Science.

I designed this brochure for the both the 2003-2004 and the 2004-2005 academic years.

Get your own Copy

To grab your own copy of this Brochure, you can download the PDF file here

Look inside

Also have a look at the "behind the scenes" (below) and learn more.

Speakers for Schools

If you are a teacher at a school in the South-East, UK, you can have academics from the University come to give a science talk on a popular subject. Just fill out the "Speakers for Schools" form (page 11) and fax or post it to back to us (address and contact details are on the form). Alternatively, get the form here

Note: The maximum travelling distance is about one hour's drive from the University, and the University will pay for all travel costs. Speakers for Schools is a free outreach activity, as are all the other activities outlined in the brochure.

Behind the Scenes Overview

This 2006 edition of the Schools Outreach Brochure was created, designed and mainly written by me. It is a 12-page, full colour with bleeding edge, A4 sized newsletter, printed on glossy paper, double sided A3 (i.e. 6 pages in all, trimmed, folded and stapled in the centre). It is the most complex print project I have worked on yet.

Credits

Of course, I can't take all the credit for the brochure and I would like to thank the following people who helped on this project:

• Sam Cantwell : in Print and Bindery, a huge "thank you" for help in the initial print runs
• Pearl John : contributions of article text, photos and proofing

Detailed credits for the images and article texts can be seen on page 12 of the brochure.

From Concept to Screen

Initially sketched on sheets of A4 paper, the most important thing in a newsletter is that you can only have certain multiples of pages (4, 8, 12...) otherwise you end up with embarrassing blank spaces. This means spreading out or squeezing in the information, text and images carefully - you can't finish a newsletter half way down an odd page and keep the rest blank as in a normal document. Newsletter content has to stretch end-to-end.

Once the main sections were drawn out and placed on paper, it was time to start laying out on the screen. This was first done in Microsoft Word. However, the complexity of the newsletter quickly out grew the capabilities of Word and so the thing was transferred over to OpenOffice Writer.

OpenOffice Writer proved difficult to work with but it also came with more control over Word. It also features a direct and powerful PDF export for those who do not have Acrobat Distiller and this proved a killer feature of the program.

Images and Graphics

The newsletter features graphics heavily in its pages and they were all created and edited in Macromedia Fireworks, which although is normally used for web graphics, is a very capable program for mixed vector/bitmap images. The images were kept in PNG graphics format to retain their quality (JPEG is fine for the screen, but should not really be used for print).

Photos came from a variety of sources, many of them have been seen and used before either online or in other University publications. Some were taken by Steve Shrimpton, a photographer in the Cartographic unit at the University. Most though were taken by the very people who worked and took part in the outreach activities.

We are grateful to the people photographed who gave us permission to allow their pictures to be used in this newsletter.

Articles and Text

One of the nightmares when working on this kind of project is obtaining the text articles from different people. Then comes the proofing afterwards, checking the edited version with everyone again and updating last minute additions. Much time was spent chasing people up, waiting for articles to be written and proofed. In some cases, it was easier to write the article myself and send a copy off to the appropriate person to sign it off.

Hopefully the newsletter is word perfect as it has been proofed by me and Pearl John before being included. Great care was taken to get details such as email addresses, phone numbers and event dates correct; but as the usual disclaimer goes: things can always change.

From Screen to Print

The story does not end when the final page is complete and proofed. Now comes print proofing. One of the most difficult things to achieve is to get what you see on screen, onto paper.

This was definitely the case with the Brochure. Working with Sam Cantwell in the Print and Bindery Centre - after many print tests - we traced the numerous print problems to errors in the PDF output when using images with alpha channel transparency. This was solved by flattening down the offending images, re-exporting and re-imposing them in Quark XPress. Though this took some time, we were finally able to have a successful initial print run.

Hot off the Press for ETOP

At the very last minute, thanks again to Sam Cantwell, I was able to have 20 full colour, pixel-perfect copies of the Schools Outreach brochure to take with me to the ETOP 2005 Conference (about). These brochures were literally hot off the press, and were printed, trimmed, folded and stapled on the Friday afternoon ready for travelling out on Sunday to the conference.

The ETOP conference was the initial print run and we printed a further 2,500 copies to be mailed out to schools across the South. If you want one, you can get it here.