Quarterly Newsletter
Designed and produced the group-wide newsletter featuring company updates, event highlights, and internal achievements.
Client
Reach Group
Timeline
October 2025
Role
Tools
Context
Reach Group had no internal newsletter before this.
As the company grew and its subsidiaries expanded, the need for a unified communications channel became clear: something that could carry company news, updates, and stories across all five business units in a consistent, professional format. There was no precedent to follow, and the brief was essentially: build it.
Outcome
As the designer responsible for the inaugural edition, I established the foundational layout system for Reach Group's quarterly newsletter, a bilingual publication distributed in PDF format across all five subsidiaries.
Key Stages
Establishing the Layout System
With no existing template to reference, I started by defining the paragraph and characters styles and design language for the newsletter, and ensuring it felt native to Reach Group's brand while being functional enough to accommodate varied content each quarter.
Bilingual Typesetting
The English and Arabic versions required fully mirrored layouts, built and managed in Adobe InDesign. This meant every design decision, like column structure, image placement, spacing, had to be considered in both directions simultaneously. Managing right-to-left Arabic typesetting alongside left-to-right English in InDesign was one of the more technically demanding aspects of the project.
Impact
Reach Group's first newsletter gave the company a professional, unified channel for internal and external communications, which was something that hadn't existed before. The bilingual format ensured it was accessible across the company's full audience, and the foundational layout system meant future editions had a solid, replicable structure to build from.
Learnings
The quick turn-around time was a bit brutal, but I've learnt a few things:
Finding alif
I can read Arabic, but typing it was a different story. Spending an hour tracking down a single character on an Arabic keyboard mid-production was a lesson in preparing for the technical side of a brief, not just the creative one. Next time, the keyboard layout gets figured out before the file gets opened.
Layout for change, not just content
Amendments to stories and copy kept coming in throughout production, a result of pulling content from multiple teams on a deadline. Building layouts with enough flexibility to absorb last-minute changes without breaking the whole design became less of a nice-to-have and more of a survival skill
Version control is non-negotiable
With a publication this size, across two languages and five subsidiaries, knowing exactly which file is the latest, the approved, and the final is critical. One wrong version going out is one too many.
Next Work