Behind-The-Scenes of The Newsletter
This year, the Newsletter took a cumulative approach of the past two years– a ‘spring-to-spring’ edition! With the work of Caio Batista (Illustration and Graphic Design), Ian Susman (Editing and Page Building), and Cierra Rossi (Content Writing and Project Management), some key events, shout-outs, and details of our past year as The Leahy Center is outlined in digital form!
Now, three months later, we are able to show you the Newsletter in all of it’s glory!
The Design Process
The first steps of the Newsletter was to first create concepts for the design. Batista was the originator of the first design concepts, working to create assets that would be used further down the line. These included page layouts, text boxes, colors, and fonts. Our main choices came down to Poppins and Figtree– which aiming to align Champlain College’s brand assets while maintaining more lighthearted tone.
“The newsletter is a celebration of the Leahy Center. We wanted to make it feel like a celebration with every page,” Batista said.
Our goal on the Marketing Team for this year was to create brand guidelines for consistency, recognizability, and seamless transitioning. This led to our current color scheme, one that we stuck with for the remainder of the Newsletter. Batista, with the assistance of Susman, helped create a comprehensive guideline for our color choices.
The Building Process
The next stage, after we had made our conceptual designs and layout was to start building the pages. Susman and I took a lot of pieces in fleshing out some of the conceptual pages– with Batista focusing in on our staff pages.
One page we found ourself falling back to over and over again was our front page. Originally, we only had an image from our staff end-of-year celebration from last year.
But then, we upgraded it with Batista’s illustration:
One of the most graphically complex pages were our “Graduation Comic Books” series– complete with comic illustrations, we extended out of our original template to create a faux comic book. We wanted to highlight some of our graduating members in a meaningful and fun way, and by illustrating their stories we were able to encapsulate their hard work and contributions to The Leahy Center.
Takeaways from Making The Newsletter
Batista and I have been on the Leahy Center Marketing team for a year now, joining Spring 2024. Last semester, Susman joined us as an intern and returned to the team for this semester. I have been honored to be a part of this team, and lucky enough to be able to see this newsletter come to fruition this semester.
These past few months couldn’t have been a better time to do it, as well! With us moving to our brand new location, we’ve had a ton of exciting events to highlight. These past few years working as a team has culminated into being able to smoothly take on this project, and celebrate not only our time at The Leahy Center, but everybody’s.
To read, please use the embed at the top of this page or use this alternative link. Using the arrow keys or mouse, you can scroll through to see the fruition of this project!
By Cierra Rossi ’27, Writing & Publishing
Cierra Rossi is a second-year Writing & Publishing student, and the Spring 2025 Team Lead for the Marketing Team.