This is a newsletter we designed for a newsletter design contest conducted in our college on March 2010. The contest was called N'Vogue and it was conducted as part of Verve '10 by the ELS (English Literary Society) of our college.

What I like about this "project" is that it was done in barely five days, and man, those five days involved a hell a lot of work… If my memory does not desert me, on an average, I slept just two and a half to three hours those five days! And with lacunae in your heart, that isn't the easiest thing to do,… if you know what I mean…

My team members were great too. Prabhu and Suresh, were cheerful companions, adding some life to all those tiring sleepless hours of work. Their ideas were the ones which built the platform for the original formatting of the newsletter. And a lot of credit is due to Hari, who came in a crunch situation, maintained a cool head and did the final touches and editing of the newsletter. And these final touches are those which really transformed the newsletter from just another tabloid to the outstanding one that it is now. Without him, we would be nowhere. Hats off to him!

And what did I do? I did the computer work, pestered everyone for genuine articles, wrote a few articles myself, and of course bunked quite a few classes! My being addicted to my computer, especially the linux environment, made me ideal for doing the computer stuff. Plus, having my own computer in hostel with a fair Internet connection was an added bonus.

And let it be noted that all work for the newsletter was done using only free and open source software.

Page formatting was done using Scribus version 1.3.3.1 GIMP 2.6.6 was used to work on images. The operating system used was Ubuntu 9.04

I was in particular impressed by Scribus and the flexibility it provided. I was totally new to Scribus when this started out, but thankfully, I adapted quickly.

And no description of the newsletter would be complete without a THANKS to all those who contributed articles to the newsletter. True, I had to pester them a bit, but in the end I could see that they really put their hearts into it. Towards the end, the contributions literally overflowed filling my inbox with so much mail, like I had never seen before. In the end, there were so many good contributions that I found it quite difficult to choose between one and the other. And , it was indeed tragedy that I had to leave out quite a few. So, to those unpublished, my sincere apologies. Your contributions mean a lot.

The newsletter looks great on A3. But printing it might be a costly affair. It is quite worth it, but still think twice before doing it.

And one last thing before we part. There is an article, "Numbers and Numerals" in the newsletter without an author name. Actually, I wrote it but forgot to mention my name on it. The article sums up my theories on numbers and is the product of very original thought on my part. So please treat it with care. Do not plagiarise it.

That's all for now, folks!