How do you design an attractive, interesting, easy to read newsletter if you’re not a designer by trade or training?
Newsletters are the fastest growing product of desktop publishing. In fact, the Mac and desktop publishing have allowed newsletters to proliferate by making it possible for anyone to create a newsletter.
Creating a good looking newsletter may be something else! Most newsletter creators were not trained as designers. They learned how to use their word processor and page layout programs and fitted information in as best they could.
However, help is available in the form of three books from Ventana Press: The Makeover Book: 101 Design Solutions for Desktop Publishing, Looking Good in Print: A Guide to Basic Design for Desktop Publishing, and Newsletters from the Desktop: Designing Effective Publications with Your Computer, all by Roger C. Parker, who conducts seminars and workshops on desktop publishing design, makeovers, and newsletters. All of the books are in clear, easy to understand English. Special terms (the jargon of desktop publishing) come with explanations and examples to make them easy to grasp.
Not for newsletters only
The Makeover Book is filled with before-and-after versions of newsletters, ads, brochures, flyers, reports, proposals, business correspondence, catalogs, booklets, menus, resumes, logos, letterheads and more. Accompanying each set of examples are explanations of the problems with the original and the value of each change in increased readability and attractiveness. The examples really speak for themselves, but the explanations teach basic principles of design in easily swallowed bites (bytes?), making it easier to translate the change into one’s own work.
Looking Good in Print is even more basic. It covers, among other things, data gathering and storage; headlines, kickers, and subheads; type selection; spacing (paragraph, word, and letter); tabs and indents; initial caps; photographs, line art, charts and diagrams; white space; and rules, borders and boxes.
One especially helpful chapter is “Twenty-Five Common Design Pitfalls.” It deals with rivers of white space, whispering headlines, claustrophobic pages, tombstoning (where headlines next to each other are read together—with hilarious or harmful results), too many typefaces, and many other traps for the unwary or uninformed designer.
This book walks you through the steps of setting up a newsletter, from deciding what the contents will be to creating the finished, attractive, easy reading pages. It includes such considerations as size, evaluation of your own work, and distribution of the final product.
Looking Good in Print covers the whole spectrum of desktop publishing. It has chapters on magazine and newspaper advertisements, sales material, books, presentation graphics, business communications, coupons and other response forms. Appendices cover color and pre-press, formats, templates, macros, shortcuts, and copyfitting.
For newsletters only
Newsletters from the Desktop is written and organized for someone wanting to start or to re-design a newsletter. It has sections on choosing the right hardware and software for your needs and using a service bureau, as well as useful newsletter-related information similar to the other two books. It includes more examples of inside pages than the other books and has suggestions for the back page, especially if part of it is used as a mailer.
One section, called “Pulling It All Together,” covers layout considerations, production schedules, article size and placement, editing or expanding to fit, last minute refinements, and typical pitfalls.
“The Newsletter Gallery” shows ten well designed newsletters and points out what makes each exceptionally good. I found myself referring frequently to this for ideas as I worked on re-designing a newsletter for a recent project.
What to choose
If you’re just getting started in desktop publishing and have no formal design training, Looking Good in Print will be the most useful for you. If you’ve got a newsletter or other product and you’re looking for ideas on how to improve it, I suggest you get The Makeover Book. If you are interested solely in newsletters and do not currently need the other areas of design, start with Newsletters from the Desktop.
However, each of the three offers valuable information, and the variety of layout ideas in each will be useful to professional designers as well as novices. I consider all three a great addition to my library.
Newsletter editors: The following note is for your information only; it is unnecessary to reproduce it with this article - (in fact, it looks silly if you do add it to the article)
This article may be reproduced and/or published in any media--print or electronic such disks or CD-ROM-- by any non-profit organization as long as authorship and copyright credits are retained. Please send one copy of the newsletter in which it appears to:
Editor, MacValley Voice
12312 Kenny Drive
Granada Hills, CA 91344-1833
If your user group does not yet exchange newsletters with MacValley Users Group, write to the address above and we can arrange an exchange.
