Long vertical bar on titlepage with rotated text

Question

Is there a nice and easy way to include a vertical colored bar on the titlepage with some rotated text? I would like to have something similar to ERDC sample, but covering the left 5cm of the page without leaving any white space. I already checked the code of erdc.cls but found it to be beyond my knowledge.

Answer 1

Here is a simple method using two minipages.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth}
\rotatebox{90}{\colorbox{red}{\makebox[0.99\textheight]{\rule{0pt}{0.3\textwidth}\textcolor{white}{\Large abcdef} \hfill}}}
\end{minipage}
\hfill
\begin{minipage}{0.65\textwidth}
A nice document
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

Answer 2

Build your titlepage with environment titlepage and package textpos like this:

\usepackage[absolute]{textpos}

\setlength{\TPHorizModule}{1mm}
\setlength{\TPVertModule}{1mm}

\begin{titlepage}
~
\begin{textblock}{50}(-35,-50)
  \begin{color}{blue}
    \rule{5cm}{33cm}    
  \end{color}
\end{textblock}

% Logo white
\begin{textblock}{130}(30,0)
   {\includegraphics[height=20mm]{Logo.jpg}
   }
\end{textblock}

% Titel
\begin{textblock}{130}(30,40)
  {\noindent \Huge %\LARGE
   \textsf{%
      \textbf{\\[4.0ex] Title of paper}\\[1.2ex] %Maintitle
       subtitle \\[1.2ex] %Subtitle
  }
\end{textblock}

\end{titlepage}