Family Reunion Newsletter
My family starting planning our annual family reunion back in 2013. My cousins and I decided to create a planning committee to coordinate the itinerary for the reunion (i.e. location, dates and times, cost, food, entertainment etc).
What started as a simple summer BBQ for one day has now grown a full weekend of family-friendly activities. This made all of us realize that we needed an easier, functional way for our family members to be updated on important information about the reunion. In the past, we talked about creating an annual newsletter but never had the time or capacity to make it. However, this was the first year we were planning an itinerary for a full weekend so we decided to go for it!
Planning out what information to include and in what order it should be placed took months to confirm. While participating in this process, I was simultaneously sketching out ideas for format and narrowing down color themes.
We always order a shirt for family members to wear during the reunion and last year the color was navy blue (see picture above). Following this color scheme from the previous reunion shirt, it helped to dictate what the front cover of this newsletter would look like.
The goal was to make the newsletter look as bold as the shirt without overdoing it. The thick, bold navy blue rectangles look nice over the pale blue background. The intersected placement of the two rectangle shapes helped to create a linear format, which became the main branding style for this newsletter.
The red logo was developed from an old photograph of the house where my grandparents raised my mother in Dominican Republic. I uploaded the image on Illustrator, altered it to give it a modern, graphic look and formatted it into a circle. I went through several iterations (logo with family quote vs. no words at all) until I landed on the image of the house alone. The red was then added to have a contrasting color to the blue tones in this design.
This logo has now become the identifying image of what our family reunion are all about; remembering where we all came from!
After months of editing both the design and information, we finally produced the eleven page newsletter with all the information needed for the reunion!
