The Evolution of a Newsletter

news·let·ter/ˈn(y)o͞ozˌletər/

Noun:	A bulletin issued periodically to the members of a society, business, or organization.
Synonyms:	bulletin

When one is commissioned to do a newsletter, the effort put in to producing one should not be a taxing and can be even be a fun experience given the following:

• a well, though-out design and layout concept,
• the appropriate visual appeal, and;
• the proper tools for the job.

About a couple of weeks ago, a call for volunteers to design and do the layouts of the quality services department's quarterly newsletter was made. This commission entailed two volunteers from the communications group (of which I recently became a part of) to work hand-in-hand to translate a smorgasbord of news articles and images (three months' worth) into a blog with an e-mail front. 

This was too good of a chance to pass up as producing this work will enable me to flex my artistic muscles (recently inactive due to project commitments) and venture out into a design frontier well-known to me, so naturally, I came forward. I volunteered to do the e-mail user interface while another person volunteered to the blog part.


A well, though-out design and layout concept
A trio of challenges presented itself during the conceptualization phase. The first was how to produce the e-mail component that should interface seamlessly with the newsletter blog. The second was how to produce the task in a week's time (given that the targeted release was by the month's end. And third, after the needs for the first two problems have been met, the question that needed to be answered will be, "What design layout should be chosen in order to make the newsletter visually appealing to the targeted audience who will view it?".

The first two challenges were met by formulating the simple solution of having the articles summarized into bulletin capsules (with the accompanying images) and laid out by easily digestable categories into a PDF document that in turn would hyperlink and open to their full versions in the blog. Now the road to the finalized newsletter was less obstructed.


The appropriate visual appeal
Admittedly though, the solution to the third and final challenge was more tricky, as people busy with their respective work will not (usually) stop doing their respective tasks just to take a gander at stuff that most consider will not probably help them complete their project milestones. And so the responsibility of the designer in this case is to ensure that the layout will pique the intended audience's interest enough to make them drop their work for a while to check it out. For this reason I decided to make the design zany but at the same time appealing and unique by itself.

While perusing the articles, I was able to come across an item regarding the department's bulletin board. From there I decided that the look and feel should be that of articles laid out bulletin board-style due to the fun factor involved (design-wise and viewership-wise) that hyperlinked to their respective segments in the blog. From there the work on the task will certainly flow out effortlessly.


Proper tools for the job
Now was the time to implement the design and layout, but in order to do this, one must evidently select the proper design and layout tools to execute and finish the job. In this case I decided to split up the work by:

• firstly, producing the visual design in Adobe Photoshop (produce the bulletin board backgrounds and pin the article images to them), and;
• lastly, lay outing the article texts in Adobe InDesign (and finalizing the PDF document)

I decided to split the backgrounds into four 8" x 11" pages with 300 dpi resolution (the number is determined usually by the amount of articles to be worked into the design). Next, I gathered various free-to-use cork board and textured paper packs culled from the web, superimposed them along with the article images into multiple layers and laid them out accordingly via the planned categories. One important thing to note is that one needs to space out the images amply in order to properly lay out the text that will be added later via InDesign. These were the results:



After doing this, one probably has completed 90% of the effort needed to produce my part for the newsletter.

Once the backgrounds have been done, one simply has to layout the first few paragraphs of each of the articles in InDesign. Create the pages needed in the application in order to place the Photoshop backgrounds. After placing the backgrounds, just place the article texts individually on each page and wrap the text around the images in order to not obscure both the text and image components of the newsletter as I've done here:

And voila! A couple of final things to do left is to link the articles to the sections in the blog. What I did here is to place some Read More icons at the end of each article and hyperlinked these icons to their respective sections in the blog. Lastly, export the InDesign work as an interactive PDF document and the newsletter is complete.

In conclusion, this is just one of the myriad ways one can produce a newsletter. There are other ways obviously, and one can check out the numerous examples available in the web that will fit one's desire to create the proper newsletter. Just coming in with right concept, design/layout outlook and use of the proper tools will help one produce quickly with minimal effort and maximum satisfaction the newsletter that your viewers will savor to read and ultimately enjoy.