You’ll probably be a little shocked to see the new Geist Community Newsletter cover design this month. Sometimes the most obvious answers to a problem are the hardest to see.
We started in 2004 as the atGeist Community Newsletter by putting the atGeist.com website logo in the upper left hand corner of each cover. My rationale: to make the newsletter look like a website that is being printed and mailed each month. It was effective for the most part, but after five years of publication, I still had people saying “oh, you have a website?” Evidently, putting the atGeist.com logo on the cover wasn’t enough.
Last fall we launched the Carmel Community Newsletter and changed the cover masthead to a giant “at” logo in a black box with the word “GEIST” underneath to match our new sister publication in Carmel. Problem was, no one in Carmel knew what the heck that “at” symbol meant. That’s when we started thinking about a new design for the newsletter, and the obvious answer arose.
With the Carmel Magazine (formerly published by the Indy Star) closed, the door was now open to just put the name of the community on the cover. The result is a new masthead design with the name of the community which they serve, Geist and Carmel, prominently placed at the top of the front cover. We haven’t moved the websites, nor is the “at” logo going away. We’ll continue to use the “at” logo mark as the corporate logo since we use the “at” moniker for all of our online properties (atGeist.com, atCarmel.com, atGeist.net, atLawrence.com, atFishers.com, and so forth).
As we grow and offer more services like GeistTV to our communities, I’m sure we’ll keep tweaking the look and feel of all the properties as they continue to converge. It’s one of the many advantages of being a small family-owned business.
A big thanks to my long-time friend and designer, Molly Tippner. I hired her back in 1993 right out of Ball State University and she’s still with me today (not only is she a great designer, she’s tolerant). She’s been helping with ad design and layout part time, but starting this fall, she’ll be doing the design and layout for all of our publications and ads. She an integral part of our success and responsible for the new design I hope you all will enjoy.
