Fundamentals of Successful Newsletters: Everything You Need to Write, Design, and Publish More Effective Newsletters

Rating:
Summary: Smashing Newsletters
Review: Thomas Bivins identifies USA Today as a model, with its colorful banner, easy-to-follow page design, full-color photographs, inviting table of contents, and short articles. As FUNDAMENTALS OF SUCCESSFUL NEWSLETTERS guidelines, the author also points to simple graphic design, with boxes, sparingly appropriate illustrations or photographs, rules, tint blocks, and no more than two typefaces, used not only for getting out an entertaining or informative or persuasive message but also decoratively as initial caps, pull quotes, and reverses. He then throws in limiting printing to two colors, with black, dark blue or dark brown giving a quality look; blue, brown, or green screening nicely as a second color; and with colored paper lending a second- or third-color look. Finally, he sees the end goal as a compatible, consistent, unified artwork all in black and white or all in color, with all formal or all informal text layout and with optically weighted sequencing from left to right and from top to bottom on each page of big to smaller, bright to muted, colorful to black and white, dark to lighter, and unusual oddly shaped to usual. It works particularly well to pool the book's information with Barbara Fanson's PRODUCING A FIRST-CLASS NEWSLETTER and Rita and Roberta Street's CREATIVE NEWSLETTERS AND ANNUAL REPORTS.