Managing Your Student Planner Design Project

Creating a good-looking student planner when you’re also supposed to be teaching or taking minutes at the SLT meeting is tricky. We know all about this balance as we hear about it every day from our customers. By bringing together some of the advice we give to our school planner customers daily we hope we might be making your life just that little bit easier. If you’ve got any questions about how we manage 1500 schools and their planners on an annual basis, please don’t hesitate to call us on 0113 2310995.

• Plan. Look at your artwork submission deadline and work backwards, setting yourself several checkpoints to ensure you don’t fall behind. Share these dates with colleagues so they can help you stick to them, and so they can supply you with their content well in advance.
• Involve key people throughout. Don’t work on your own on designing your student planner. Ask for help from your colleagues, we find that collaboration really creates interesting results. When asking for content from your colleagues to add to the planner perhaps you could provide them with a template to complete with their ideas, that way it’s easier to collate everything together later. Content already created from your prospectus or marketing flyers can be a great starting point.
• Look for the obvious changes first. 95% of student planner content doesn’t change year-on-year. Make sure when you review the previous year’s content you look for dates and names first. Change the dates and check the names are still relevant. You’ll feel better knowing you’ve done that, and you’ll be a huge step nearer to completing the job! You can tick off these pages first and therefore can focus on what’s left to work on.
• Familiarise yourself with the creative tools. We’ve developed an online design tool called MyPenstripe which works like Word online, schools love it because they can access their content remotely and easily edit the content before submitting to print.
• Give yourself time to proofread, and then get someone else to check too. You’ll be amazed at the amount of crazy errors we see when planner artwork is given to us for print. One year a school even spelt their name wrong on the cover. IN BIG BLACK LETTERS! Our advice is to make the changes to your planner, print a copy out, and then look at it over a cuppa. Once you’ve done that then get someone who’s had nothing to do with the project to look over it for you too. You’ll thank yourself in the long run.

All schools working with Penstripe on their student planners are given an experienced Project Manager to work with, they really know what they’re doing. We will also provide you with access to MyPenstripe, our web browser based system that supports and prompts the creation of great artwork.

We believe we can provide a better artwork experience than your current supplier. There’s only one way to find out. Get in touch today on 0113 2310995 or email info@penstripe.co.uk and we’ll talk you through our easy on-boarding process.