Sevenoaks Town Council publishes the Town Crier, a quarterly magazine that is its main channel for keeping residents up to date on services, events and local news. Previously produced in-house, it was ready for a major refresh, and the council brought me in to redesign it into a more contemporary, magazine-style publication and to build reusable templates the team could use themselves in Adobe InDesign.
It’s a publication the council is required to deliver to every resident – a captive audience, but historically there was little to make anyone stop and read it. My aim was to turn that obligation into something people would genuinely want to pick up. I created a fresh colour palette, built a flexible column grid and flatplan for a far more picture-led approach, and set a clear typographic system. Three masthead options were presented for the retained Town Crier title, and the new design reworked the cover, contents, the Mayor’s column and the dense functions-and-facilities listings – all supplied as templates the council can produce in-house and send straight to print.
