Martin's BCIM Website Blog

 
Geoff E. asked me a while ago to take over editorship of the BCIM Staff Newsletter. Only one edition of the newsletter has been produced so far, and that was back in February. The editor was January P., who subsequently left the University. The 1st edition was distributed as a traditional desktop-published leaflet, and later archived on the intranet in PDF format. For future editions I think it would be much better to have a more simply formatted HTML version and to distribute colour printouts of that, as we used to do within SCISM. This way the newsletters will become an integral part of the StaffWeb, and we can have hyperlinks into and out from individual newsletter articles.

I've been thinking about a design for the newsletter, and have spent the last couple of days re-vamping the 1st edition of the newsletter to show what it would look like in the new style. Here is my proposed design, illustrated via this re-vamped 1st edition.

 
Notes:

• Attention to detail - especially punctuation and grammar - was rather poor in the 1st edition, and I would hope to do better in these respects! (I haven't made an attempt to fix the errors in the re-vamped version.)
   
• As regards distribution in hard copy (or electronic?) form, here's how the 1st edition would look (in PDF format). The page breaks aren't great; I will need to pay more attention to this in subsequent editions. Given the unpredictablility of page breaks on different users' systems, we should always provide a pre-formatted PDF version for downloading in addition to the HTML version.