On newsletter design, by Rachel Pritchett, synod communicator

Hey church newsletter writers,

Thanks for all the hard work you do on those newsletters. I and many others read and enjoy them every month, online and in print, and know how much work you are doing to make them look so good. A few of you are coming out weekly online these days, as well. Mountain View in Edgewood and Pilgrim in Puyallup are just a couple. Wow. You are truly appreciated.

Just to touch base on the synod newsletter and where I'm at, I've been tweaking the design lately, and think I'm just about where I want to be for now with the March newsletter, considering what I work with, which is the simple, clunky and hard-to-use Word. The March newsletter should be up shortly today at http://www.lutheranssw.org/news-publications.

My overall intention was to make the newsletter more screen-friendly and readable.

I'm not reinventing the wheel here — this is pretty standard stuff, but I switched the body text from the great newspaper font, Times New Roman, to the more simple, one-tone family of Arial fonts, though I could have just as well gone with Swiss. I stayed at 11 point, but Arial takes up a lot more room than Times New Roman. That's especially true since I loosened up the tracking, or space between the lines, so I'm at a 1 to 1.1 ratio now. I surely would have gone even looser, maybe a 1 to 1.2 or 1.3 ratio, like The Seattle Times online does, had it not been taking up so much room.

I also put a whopping 8 points between each paragraph as stepping stones for the eye between paragraphs.

I retained Times New Roman for the headlines, but unbolded it and bumped up the size from 16 point to 18 point to compensate. The idea was to retain the elegance that this magnificent font offers, but not to task readers with it in the body copy since most of you are reading it online now (A Garmond is just as beautiful for headlines, you choose, lovely or just as lovely). I'm working on an 8.5-by-11 page, but if I were working on a folded half page, I'd bump the heads down to 16 and probably 14.

Besides having a goal of being more screen-friendly, my overall style goal was to try for a look of simple elegance. For me, that means the discipline of never going outside of two font families, even though it's a bunch of fun to fool around with fonts. It means not bolding too much of anything without a good reason, flush-lefting everything, rag-righting everything and most of all, banning gimmicky graphics. Anything that says "clip art" on it should never see the light of day in a newsletter. I know some of you disagree, considering the amount of clip art being used. To me, it's cluttery, distracting, condescending and childlike. I may be guilty of "gimmicky" with the shadow I'm putting behind the photos in the synod newsletter. But I'm hoping I'm being subtle enough. I like the pop.

I'm hoping my redesign is quiet enough that no one will notice.

Another thing I did was to do away with indents. Also, I stuck with one column going across the page. Yes, I know it's a long journey with no rest stop for the eye. But while two- or three-column newsletters work in hard print, they don't on the screen, because the reader has to scroll up and down.

My particular big problem was having two logos on the cover, that of the ELCA and of the synod. Both look like beach balls; in fact, the synod logo has the same colors in the same locations as the ELCA logo. When I stuck both of them on the cover, it started to look like a beach-blanket bingo party with Frankie and Annette. So I think I'm going to go with the synod logo on the cover because it's our brand, and place the ELCA logo somewhere inside where it doesn't matter designwise. I might just lose it, however.

See Rachel's beach-ball failure in the February synod newsletter at http://www.lutheranssw.org/news-publications.

On my finished PDF newsletter, I'm keeping mine down to 1 megabyte and no bigger. It's asking readers too much to take the time to download something gigantic. It looks as if most everyone is keeping below that, but there are a few who are at 2, 3 and even 4 megabytes.

That means I have to keep my photo files as small as I can without compromising clarity. I'm not putting a photo that's any bigger than 75 kb or so, usually.

We had a newsletter writers' design and content forum about 5 years ago in the synod office. If there's interest, let's have another in early summer after the assembly blows over. I'd invite in some of the e-newsletter heroes of our synod to help lead. We had about 15 attendees last time. That's a good number.

Keep on writing and designing — I feel I know each one of you because I've seen your stuff all these years. But in fact, I only know some of you. Let me know what you would do to improve my redesign, or if you'd like me to critique yours.

Rachel

P.S. I think the most important thing any of us can do is to put all our identification on the cover. That includes the congregation's pastor, address, phone, email, essential staff and contacts, website, blog, Facebook page and mission statement. I run mine ID stuff down one side, same font, same size, 9 point, simple, simple, simple. There are a lot of newsletters in our synod that have that essential reaching-out stuff inside or lack it altogether. The newsletter is a great evangelism tool, if done right. I'm working on it; I know you are, too.

If you haven't received the March synod newsletter to see my redesign, email me at rachelpritchett@msn.com.