All in a Day's Work

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It's not just Spring that's brightening things up - the new undergraduate prospectus has been injecting a little colour into our lives as well. Well, quite a lot of colour. Wearing sunglasses to protect himself from the glare, Publications Officer Andrew Proctor discusses the toil involved in producing 'the prospectus of the millennium'.

An undergraduate prospectus is a year in the making, from planning through to print. It's pretty much the case that no sooner have we finished, we have to start all over again. At the moment, in fact, we're starting to plan for the 2001 entry prospectus, which will be printed in March 2000. We've always got to think several years ahead, and that's quite tricky sometimes.

We produce three main publications a year - the postgraduate prospectus and the study abroad prospectus both come out in late summer. There is an overlap though when we work on all three, so it gets a bit hectic around February/March time. There's only myself and the Publications Assistant, Bryony Randall, working in the office, and there are big loadings at certain times of the year.

It does take a lot of self discipline to persevere with something you know isn't going to be needed until many months down the line. But if you don't knuckle down early on, the backlog of work becomes impossible. It's very different to the kind of work I used to do on magazines. I worked in Hong Kong, mostly on travel trade magazines - and yes, I do miss the free trips a bit! On a newspaper or a magazine what you do is a very small part of the whole. You might be responsible for the news pages or a couple of features, and that's all you do. Generally, you write whatever you write, it gets thrown at the sub-editor and they totally re-write it. Then another team of people might lay it out on the page and headline it. By the time it gets to print, it's usually very different to what you first wrote.

Here, we do all the research, much of the writing, all the commissioning for photography and graphic design, and we also do a lot of on-screen editing and layout. And of course, there's a lot of editorial checking and double-checking, getting the facts just right. It is a long process, but I do get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing it through from start to finish. When it's all over it's a brilliant feeling to complete it, and that takes you through.

The prospectus has changed a lot in the last few years, moving from a handbook of the University's courses to more of a marketing document. It also forms part of the contract between the University and its students, so we have to consider what we say very seriously. If we said that it's always sunny in Brighton, we could be held liable for rainy days. You have to be very accurate. And you have to tread a fine line between being accessible and dumbing-down. But Higher Education is becoming more and more competitive, whether we like it or not. A lot of academics aren't very comfortable with the marketing role, they don't like marketing speak. But we have to find the right balance. We want to get across the dynamic nature of Sussex; its unique characteristics, and to do this we use a lot of photos, and write in a lively and engaging style. We aren't in the business of dumbing-down, but we do want to make the prospectus approachable.

I think it's enormously important to be aware of who you're writing for. Magazines have a clear target audience - if you write for Sub-Aqua Monthly, you've got to remember who it is that's wearing the flippers, and it's the same with the prospectus. We run focus groups with our own students, sixth-formers and other potential applicants to try and find out what people want and need, what they respond to. When we showed people this year's cover they were generally positive: some said it was like a club flyer or that it was wacky and futuristic. We were trying to go for a 'new millennium' feel, so that was good. The prospectus is serious stuff, it plays a big part in a very important decision, but you have to be aware of what's happening out there to engage your readership. I think you have to be pretty young at heart.