Description
From August 1, 2018 to July 31, 2019, I completed a voluntary service at Deutsche Seemannsmission Westküste e. V. (German Seamen’s Mission) in Brunsbüttel, a small harbor town in Northern Germany that holds quite a substantial industrial and port facility. Several ships with crew members from all corners of the world stop here every day. As a volunteer, it was my job to to welcome the seafarers on the ships, talk to them and help them with any worries or problems they had. The website of the Seamen's Mission Brunsbüttel offers a more detailed insight into the activities (in German).
To my luck, I was also able to practice myself in media design quite a few times during my voluntary year: The Seamen’s Mission in Brunsbüttel is very small in terms of personnel and relies heavily on volunteers—so voluntary work was and is always appreciated. This is how I came to design a print flyer that could be handed out on the ships. It supplied the people on board with important information about the German Seamen’s Mission and the town of Brunsbüttel. You can find out more here (in German).
Designing an entire book
Designing a flyer and distributing it with way over a thousand copies was something completely novel for me and therefore super exciting. The flyer received positive feedback from seafarers and colleagues alike and so another, much larger design project was already around the corner: A volunteer and former editor at the local newspaper had written a chronicle about the Seamen’s Mission in Brunsbüttel. Over 50 pages of text and (historical) pictures—all that was missing was a way to structure and style all of the content. So I took it upon myself to process the material into a book—and thus gained my first real experience in the field of desktop publishing!
The initial complete version of the book got finished around half a year after my voluntary service had ended. In the meantime I gained plenty of knowledge through my first semester in Media Informatics, which is why I decided to start the project over from scratch with more expertise and new ideas. The revised version of the book got published in June of 2020 and is since then available for purchase at Seamen’s Mission Brunsbüttel.