I developed these brochures in consultation with the TRU Writing Centre.  They are based on the 80/20 rule of design, in that they are intended to cover the 20% of the material that users will need 80% of the time.  For the remaining 80% of the material that is needed 20% of the time, students are directed to the Library’s LibGuides.

The biggest challenge of  doing these brochures was first deciding what to include, and then fitting it all onto the two sides of a single 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.  The Writing Centre originally asked for a single brochure with MLA on one side and APA on the other, based on the MLA and APA  wall posters available from Purdue OWL.  The problem was that if the contents of a wall poster are crammed onto an 8 1/2 sheet  of paper, the text will be illegible, so I proposed two separate brochures, one for MLA and one for APA.

I then selected a template in Microsoft Publisher and began tweaking  it to suite my needs.   In the end, the most useful thing that these brochures “inherited” from the original template was  the Perpetua font, which works very well at small sizes and, because of it’s very small x-height, looks sort of double spaced even when it isn’t.  (This is important because students tend to follow examples in a very literal way, so if an example citation doesn’t look double spaced, the chances are that their citations won’t be double spaced.)