Newsletter Nameplate

--Nancy H.

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 Miller

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.

--Nadine Scheller-BlaskoNadine -- The best scheme for a two-color publication is to use black and a relatively dark accent color. Forest green (PMS 340), fireball red (PMS 185) and navy blue (PMS 280) are all good examples of accent colors that are dark enough to use at 100 percent for text and that create nice screen tint backgrounds when you shade them to 10 or 20 percent.

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 Medusky

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.

I spoke and did 20 or so one-on-one design consultations at a conference this past weekend, and by coincidence (I hope) several people complained that their printed pieces came out much darker than they appeared on the screen or on their laser printer proof. Although press operators have been known to create bad printing from good artwork, I think the culprit in every case I looked at this weekend was a failure to take "dot gain" into account.

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.)