Any freelance/expert Indesign users?

[billyboy]

Hi
I am putting together a big website due to be launched mid- October. One of the major hooks for visitors is a bilingual magazine for students of English and Spanish. We have the whole team ie professional editor, translators, the overall corporate image, contributors, but we are short of a whizz layout guy/gal who can quickly layout all the info uploaded to him/her, liaise with the editor and produce the final online magazine.

It will be a monthly effort to start with, quality not quantity. It is being done on a voluntary basis at the moment, but the magazine can become a cash cow, I believe, and the deal would be that the main players shared the proceeds.

If you are interested, and you arent going to try to convince me that you can do it in Word or we can do it ourselves with practice! please drop me a line.

Thanks

 

[billyboy]

Some more details

Just to add some meat to the post, we have the team to produce high quality content in English and Spanish. They will concentrate on compiling the articles, the images, animations, whatever they think ties into a magazine suitable for teenagers in the English and Spanish speaking world. The material be sent to the layout person. It will be a monthly edition to start with. I cannot confirm how many pages, because until we have someone proficient in layout, we cannot say how much content to produce! Chicken and egg situation there.

The website design is basically a left navigation bar and a two column body - English and Spanish to be shown side by side. The layout expert can do as they see fit as long as it falls into some basic criteria. The images etc placed as you decide too, for best effect within the body. You would be in touch with the editor in order to ensure the final result was as envisaged, or hoped for, by both parties.

As regards design elements, what we dont have is the homepage for the e-magazine in a professional format ie the designer knows what he wants to make a splash, but he can only put together a "sketch" as he isnt familiar with a professional DTP package. The rest of the site's corporate look will be decided.

The whole website is advert free, but the magazine would be a place to generate income from publicity. I would hope the team can come up with imaginative ways to incorporate ads without resorting to columns of flash ads, ugly blocks of adsense etc More subtle as in one instance, select afiliate programmes - they write an article and it includes links to say iTunes Music Store for a 4% commission, or to book stores...

If you ask about budget, there isnt one if you are talking about covering expenses, as time and skills with the tools we have at our disposal are being offered free! On the other side of the balance sheet however, the good thing about no budget is that there is no limit on what the income for the team could be as advertising revenue increases. Whatever it generates from visitors to a multi-faceted site will be for the e-magazine team

The downside is, if you don't share our philosophy and believe it is worth a punt contributing to a new website that is going to attract a LOT of traffic from a very targetted audience, then it looks like a bad idea.

I don't know if any of this prompts a response from someone looking for a project to get stuck into, I hope it does. If you like the idea of working with some very dynamic Spanish, US and British people, and creating something worthwhile, this could be the one to get involved with from the start. I dont know if you realise how many people are learning English and Spanish, but it is a considerable market and what we are doing is tapping into a very underserviced market. ie lots of potential and we have some very dynamic ideas for content, and the means to deliver those ideas. Just need someone to make it look nice.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

cheers

Andy

 

[Sparky's]

2 things I see missing in your description, One what is the subject and "genre" of the magazine to be, and Two in my experience I think that once the Home Page is established that an option to continue in either Spanish or English should be offered. This would allow more content to be displayed on each page.

I am currently working with several customers in the commercial printing field as a layout designer for newsletters, brochures, flyers, and multi-media marketing and have over 30 years experience in the field. I admit I'm new to the actual web apps that are available but I am currently in the process of developing our company web site using Adobe "Go-Live" I use both PC and Mac OS and utilize the entire Adobe Creative Suite (CS2) for my work, as well as QuarkXpress and other software.

I would be interested in developing a conversation with you to discuss the venture further.

Sparky