Who said print was dead

The second week in after the Christmas break and things are going rather smoothly (despite my silly picture on the right!) We usually have a busy period the last two months of the year and then we have a bit of a lull before pre-Clearing starts. So I’m enjoying having time to catch up on reports.

Publications

So, we’re working on a few publications at the moment. We’ve recently briefed back the second round of amends to the undergraduate 2017 prospectus. It’s been relatively easy this time around considering the changes we’ve had to make – absorbing the international aspects as we’re no longer producing a separate international publication, UCAS point changes, plus other factors.

We’ve also briefed back the first round of amends to the mini guide, so this is also going well. It’s such a small publication compared to the main prospectus so between the three of us in the team, this isn’t too big of a task.

The final publication I’m working on at the moment is our fees brochure. We’ve not produced a solus fees brochure for a couple of years, so I’ve been working with our freelance designer to create this in line with our 2016 suite of publications. I’ve just briefed back the final amends on this and we’re two weeks ahead of schedule, which I love!

Once we sign off the undergraduate prospectus, it won’t be long before we’ll be starting work on the postgraduate 2017 prospectus.

I know a lot of people think that marketing is moving towards a more digital focus, which is largely right to a certain degree, but there’s still very much a need for supporting printed collateral, and we always have at least one printed publication on the go at any one given time throughout the cycle.

To help with future projects I’m going to be working on an error log – where we will log all common errors that we come across time and time again when working on publications and campaigns, in the hope that by doing this we can eliminate them for future projects and therefore make our job a little bit easier. I’m also going to be working on updating our in-house style guide. Our style guide is a little bit outdated so it’ll be good for us to be working from new ones later this year. I’ll be liaising with the digital team and the communications team as well to ensure we take into account their needs, as we all use these guides as part of our daily role, whether its creating artwork or writing copy and news stories. 

Come in, we’re open

We’re also in the thick of the open day season with three UG open days taking place in February – Luton and Bedford, UCMK and Aylesbury, and we’ve also got our PG open day in February too. So we’ve been sending out emails, creating artwork, sending items to external media, and setting up more Google activity; all in a day’s work!

Some of our artwork for our forthcoming open days

And besides the above, like I mentioned earlier - I‘ve got a little down time to catch up on my evaluations before pre-Clearing kicks off!

Speak soon,

K