This week our class is going through the second half of an InDesign workshop. As part of their "backgrounder" assignment, the students are required to do research on the theme of social media within businesses and industry. They have a total of four options to choose from and each option, roughly speaking, centers on figuring out how social media (twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, etc.) are used in whatever specific industry they choose. The example I like to give is to look at the footwear industry: what type of social media presence do Nike, Reebok, ADIDAS, and other have? Do they focus on one specific site or do they try a broad approach?
One of the sources I had them look at was the attached pdf "White paper on white papers".
The company, appum, specializes in creating white papers (another term for backgrounder) for companies. Essentially, it's a way to outsource company documents.
This is why we're focusing on InDesign in 420: getting hands-on experience creating these documents is essential to understanding the fundamentals of document design. The pdf is a way to look at the process of creating white papers by looking at a sample white paper.
