Newsletter for friends of gold butte national monument

Friends of Gold Butte National Monument (FOGB) is a non-profit organization located in Nevada that supports and promotes Gold Butte National Monument. The monument is located near the southern tip of Nevada, to the East of Lake Mead. Through the hard work and support of FOGB and a history of support from the citizens of Nevada, Gold Butte was given the status of a National Monument in 2016. The monument contains many sites of cultural and historical relevance – such as petroglyphs and rock art – as well as stunning sandstone formations and important ecosystems for local wildlife. The FOGB organization is incredibly involved in their community and their mission of protecting and caring for Gold Butte.

I connected with FOGB through Patagonia Actionworks, a program in partnership with the website Catchafire, which helps connect non-profits with skilled volunteers. I worked with both the executive director and the marketing coordinator of FOGB to create a fall 2018 newsletter, as well as a template that they can use to create future newsletters. FOGB needed a newsletter that could be sent out quarterly to their members to help share organizational news, events, articles, calendars, and more. It was important that the newsletter design worked well with the bold, minimalist, and bright branding of FOGB while also remaining simple enough to be adapted in the future. I chose to anchor the design with simple geometric shapes and lines and support that simplicity with the fun, vibrant colors used in FOGB’s branding. It was important to me that the design and subsequent template not be so complex that future newsletters were forced to use the same exact format of the Fall 2018 one, but not so simple that there was no direction to follow in the future. The template materials produced included several different cover variations, written instructions and rules, a calendar template, several adaptable page layouts, individual graphic elements for building pages from scratch, one document for building the newsletter design in, and one document for printing the newsletter.

This project with FOGB not only provided the wonderful opportunity to create an important product for an incredible organization, but it gave me the experience of creating something that will enable further design in the future. Creating the template was a unique and challenging experience that I really appreciate, as I had to really consider the person who would be building off my design in the future. This project also reaffirmed my love of design in connection with public land and environmental non-profits, and using design to support the important work they do to help their audiences learn and appreciate their natural spaces.