Designing an emag in PowerPoint! Are you crazy! Yes, yes I am…

I was recently asked to design a template for a magazine style monthly publication, to be produced under the patronage of our GMD and distributed to all staff in our Business Unit (Telstra Consumer and Telstra Country Wide).

The aim was to ‘connect’ our people together, share good news stories, highlight what individuals are doing in the community, and generally let them know that the business is listening and taking on board their feedback. Feedback about processes, products, systems – anything that needs changed and can be changed to make their jobs easier or better serve our customers.

Lovely, I thought. I’ve wanted to learn InDesign so what a good excuse. I grabbed a book, checked out a few tutorials at Lynda.com and off I went. I was fairly pleased with the design – quite different to anything else that was being published internally, it looked fresh and interesting.

While waiting for the content for the first edition, I managed to get involved in creating a template for another magazine style newsletter for the Contact Centres. As they were going to be managing it themselves and didn’t have InDesign, I decided to build their template in PowerPoint. Yes, PowerPoint.

Now before you all run away screaming into the night in horror, let me tell you that good old PPT is quite handy – if you can get out of the ‘pack/deck’ mentality and think of it as a general purpose layout tool. It’s far less fiddly than InDesign, much easier to use than MS Publisher, and more flexible than Word. Its design tools have greatly improved in recent versions, making the creation of flyers, posters, desk cards, handouts and the like, fast but not furious. And that’s what I use it for, much more than I do for decks.

In the end, the two parties involved with both magazines merged forces and we went with the PPT version. Mainly because it wasn’t clear who was going to be  managing it going foward and I didn’t know what tools they might have access to or knowledge of.

I really quite like it, but the best thing is that just about anyone else can take over what you created and run with it. If they aren’t quite as designy orientated as you, they may not run as well, but run they can. Just as well, as I am now moving on to another role.

So, whatever tools you are using, try and think of them just as that – tools that can help you be creative, quickly, without having to learn something new.