Piedmont Triad Credit Union is a credit union serving central North Carolina. It is a credit union that prides itself on a loyal and trustworthy clientele base. That trust comes from PTCU's commitment to education and transparency. Education appears in the form of describing services offered by PTCU, sharing the latest news concerning personal financial management, and explaining complex banking practices that could be beneficial to their customers. Transparency appears in their full disclosure of assets and making information regarding general financial standing openly available.
I was asked to redesign their newsletter format. They had an established branding point of view and already had a set expectation of what to include in these newsletters. The challenge was to make this information-dense newsletter more engaging to their readers. In previous iterations, the amount of information in the newsletter and the complexity of the financial tables included were overwhelming to the average reader.
My solution to this problem was to find as many visual means to compartmentalize the information and break it down into digestible chunks. Readability was also something of importance, so I convinced them to slightly adjust their typeface selections to more readable choices. I used the imagery they provided but adjusted colors using Photoshop to make them fit in better with their branding palette. I also made use of graphic shapes reminiscent of their logo to both reinforce the branding and achieve the task of compartmentalizing the provided information. In InDesign, I made sure to use plenty of character and paragraph styles for consistency across the document and constructed a 12x12 grid based on the margins to create adequate spacing and alignment.
