Welcoming a president

On Tuesday, November 18 our Tasmanian state capital city of Hobart was visited by Chinese President Xi Jinping and First Lady Peng Liyuan. I was fortunate to be part of the team that designed and published a special front cover for the Mercury to mark the occassion, and I was thrilled to see the final product on the newsstands.

In reflection of the Chinese flag, we chose a deep red as the overall theme colour of the page. This really helped the paper to stand up strongly against the more conventional colours of the other papers on the stands. We also took the extra step of using Chinese characters in addition to the normal English typesetting, so that our welcome messages could be read in both languages.

Chinese is a very intricate language with many subtelties, and our editorial team worked closely with the Chinese Community here in Hobart to ensure that the messages were correct. A final check was provided by Kate Ritchie’s expert team at Chin Communications in Victoria, who made some careful revisions and also did an outstanding job of typesetting the final passages of Chinese characters for us to embed in our finished artwork. Kate provided a set of outlined Adobe Illustrator files to our size specifications and these fitted into our layout perfectly.

Kate and the team at Chin Communications were a pleasure to work with. Their service was exceptional and the quality of their work was outstanding.

There were additional technical challenges to address as well. The cover was prepared as full poster to wrap from the front of the paper around to the back, and to achieve this we needed to make some special adjustments to our Eidose Methode page layout system.

This was a great project to be involved with and it was very rewarding to hear that the Chinese Presidential special edition drew a terrific response throughout Tasmania and interstate.