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Designing Your Newsletter Yourself? Follow These Rules for Best Results
If the task of designing your newsletter — choosing typefaces and colors, placing copy and photographs, and creating graphics — has fallen on your shoulders, make sure to follow these common sense rules for best results.
Use Restraint
Just because your computer can handle thousands of typefaces and millions of designs, don't use them all in a single document. Jumping from typeface to typeface and design to design makes the finished product hard to read. Unlike other ads, Adwords neither arouse the visitor's curiosity nor disturb the main flow of the web page. In fact, the opposite is true. Adwords are meant to look like part of the search results giving the user the feeling that those ads are there because he asked for them. No one has any doubt that this simple design helps Google to promote both their search engine and the Adwords advertising program.
Choose the Correct Typeface
Different type styles are best for different jobs. An informal typestyle on a formal document diminishes the impact, and readers are less likely to take the work seriously.
Always Use Appropriate Margins
Consistent margins give finished pages a neat, clean appearance.
Strive for Uniformity
Keep a document's appearance uniform throughout an entire work. Three columns on one page, two on the next and four on another makes a finished piece appear haphazard.
Balance Your Spreads
For side-by-side pages — called "spreads" — make sure that each page balances the other. Often what looks good on a single page doesn't look quite as good placed beside a similar page. Balancing spreads is easily accomplished when you design facing pages as a single unit, spreading graphics, titles, or art across both.
Use Headlines
Strong, powerful type attracts a reader's attention. Use descriptive headlines and a typestyle that's larger than the text, which attracts the reader to the body of the text.
Overuse White Space
Avoid the tendency to overfill pages with text, designs, and artwork. White space makes your pages more appealing and readable. By adding more white space to your documents, important elements such as headlines and designs stand out even more.
Highlight Important Points
Add illustrations, graphs, artwork, and pull quotes to emphasize important points. Important facts, quotes, and results can be highlighted using a text block inside a border, reversing the text (white on black instead of black on white, for instance), or setting text in a larger typestyle.
Add Descriptive Captions
Add captions to graphics, photos, and artwork when appropriate. It's also a good design idea to add subheads or captions to long blocks of text.
Don't Overlook Color
Adding color to your finished product adds interest and appeal.
Proofread Everything
No matter how good a graphic designer you become, failing to correct obvious mistakes distracts a reader. Misspelled words, grammatical errors, and missing punctuation stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.
Be Willing to Experiment
With a computer, you'll probably have all the tools you need to experiment with graphics. Don't be afraid to explore — you may discover some great alternative designs. |
