Nancy -- Newsletters should bear no resemblance whatsoever to research studies, five-paragraph essays, technical white papers or rambling personal letters. They should tell the reader who, what, why, etc. and then stop. Paragraphs of one sentence are just fine. Try to vary your paragraph lengths, but shoot for an overall average in the 30-40 word range. Yes, short and punchy is good. Even sentence fragments.

Tom-- Competition between a serif and a compatible sans serif font family can make a newsletter design dynamic all by itself. If you have chosen that route (of giving the design equal weight with the articles), use the serif typeface for the main text and the sans serif for all/most headlines and the captions. Limit your font choices to these two families, but use them throughout the newsletter. If everything else in the newsletter is in, say, Times Roman, don't suddenly import the alien influence of Helvetica just for the captions. If your newsletter tends to have long captions with a lot of names, feel free to make the type size as small as 8 point. However, use the same type size, style and leading for every caption.

The four most legible color schemes are, in this order: black on yellow, black on white, blue on white and green on white. Finally, if you plan more than two colors, you should employ the services of a color wheel to determine complementary colors. For example, a purplish ink such as Reflex Blue looks good on beige paper because yellow and purple fall on opposite sides of the additive color wheel.

Carol -- It's great that you wrote prostate instead of prostrate. It's amazing how many professional journalists call that little gland by the wrong name. Call the Columbia Journalism Review! The routine human resources stuff you have now is OK. Keep that. Do not succumb to the temptation to print pithy quotes ("There is no try. There is only do or do not." -- Yoda, the Jedi master). Unless extremely relevant, quotes aren't very interesting to most people and sound preachy. The easiest way to create interesting, relevant articles for an employee newsletter is to include a feedback form. It can be of the "What surgeries have you had recently?" variety, but survey questions make more interesting reading. "Do you think the cancellation of Murder She Wrote was the fault of CBS or Angela Landsbury?" "What is your favorite variety of music?" "On a scale from one to five, please rate the following news anchors." and so on. You don't have to run around at all... and sorting through survey forms can be quite entertaining.

Every printing press and paper combination spreads (darkens) the dots that make up halftone images (aka "pictures). The 2-3% dot gain on a typical commercial offset press printing on coated stock is hardly noticeable. However many older, smaller presses (particularly those favored by "quick print" shops) can have dot gain of 8%-12%, often even more on uncoated paper, along with an insufficient ability to adjust ink flow to different areas of the paper. Web presses, especially newspaper web presses (which typically do not heatset the ink immediately after printing), are a different story altogether. Dot gains of 25-30% are common.

Since dot gain darkens photos, it makes normal photos muddy. Photos that are heavily screened back so they can appear behind text become too dark. For example, a photo that has been lightened to 20% of normal will appear as if the screen is 30-40% on a web press. (There isn't a direct correlation between dot gain and darkness because there are many other variables, especially with color printing.)

1. Religion
2. Royalty
3. Sex
4. Mystery.

The prizewinner finished with just one sentence: "My God," said the queen, "I'm pregnant. I wonder who did it?"

Susan -- Hey, Susan, watch it! We pay good money for clip art that looks better than what most people have (we subscribe to Clipper and Designer's Club, two monthly services from Dynamic Graphics). Now that the ranting is over, the answer to your question is: don't just slap any old clip art down without adjustments. That's the wonder of electronic art. Prior to the late 1980s when desktop publishing started to become a major force for good in the universe, it was a pain in the behind to mess with clip art. With Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop (not to mention a half dozen other good software programs), manipulating stock artwork can get you a result that's almost as good as drawing it from scratch. Most of the stock artwork we use is modified in dozens of ways before it winds up in print. We add colors, mix similarly drawn pieces together, flip-flop, rotate, distort, crop and add shadows until we have what we want (or until we can't afford to waste anymore time on it!). For example, we needed a drawing of a pregnant woman and her husband (or boyfriend)...

This piece of clip art was a good start, but the flier was for first-time parents, so the girl had to go.	We flopped it horizontally (so that we could use it on the lefthand side of the flier).	Using PhotoShop, we erased the girl and fixed up where her arm appeared.

Kristine -- Photographs are better right now because they are available, inexpensive and popular. Design trends may shift back in favor of clipart soon, but it will probably require better indexing (as is available with stock photos). From a design standpoint, photographs are usually more evocative and provide a more professional appearance. Clipart is usually a compromise when it comes to communicating a specific point. Photographs are easier to manipulate and modify.