Designing a newsletter on your PC is easy, but making it look professional takes a bit more effort. Ben Pitt reveals the dos and don’ts of DTP
Publishing was the first creative industry to undergo a digital revolution, and today anyone can design a printed document with the humblest computer hardware. Desktop publishing (DTP) isn’t just a matter of having the right tools, though. Like any creative process, there’s a skill to getting great results, not to mention lots of rules and conventions involved in good design. You may wish to ignore them, but it’s nonetheless a good idea to get to grips with them first.
Now we bring you a bluffer’s guide to producing a newsletter or marketing brochure that looks like it’s been put together by a design professional.
PACKAGING UP
Our first tip for desktop publishing is to ditch Microsoft Word and other word processors. Word is perfect for writing letters, but after 30 years of development it still seems to struggle with more demanding DTP tasks - or at least, we struggle to get it to do what we want.
Serif PagePlus X8 is an excellent mid-price option at £90. For this article we’ve used Xara Page & Layout Designer 10, which costs £50 from www.xara.com. It’s very similar to the excellent Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 10, but misses a few photo-editing features and gains a few DTP features, including better handling of text columns and the ability to export in PDF/X format for professional printing. You can follow most of this tutorial using any DTP software, and nearly all the specific commands apply to both Xara packages. If you don’t yet own suitable software, download the demo of Xara Page & Layout Designer from Xara’s website.
MAKE A SPLASH
We’ve split the design process into discrete steps, but that’s not really how it’s done in practice. You might start with an image, a headline, a logo or a block of text, and other elements can come into play in whatever order you like. Some designs will be free-flowing while others will be more structured from the start.
Your first decision is what paper format to go for. Most people habitually put A4 paper in their printer, but lots of other shapes, sizes, thicknesses and finishes are available from specialist stores. There are lots of ways to fold paper, too. An A4 sheet can be used flat, folded to make an A5 booklet or folded in three like a takeaway menu. If you’re folding paper you’ll need to think carefully about which pages appear where so they’ll print correctly, but we’re sure you can work it out. A3 printers are now available for under £100 so it’s easier than ever to produce A4 booklets. Xara’s Page Options dialog box is found under the File menu.
Every document needs some kind of banner (known as a masthead) or title page so it’s immediately obvious what it’s for. Ideally you’ll have a lovingly crafted logo ready to use, or you might be up for having a go yourself. Logo design is an ambitious task for newcomers to graphic design, though, so for our examples we’ve kept it simple.
Type your title and choose a chunky font that’s easy to read and in keeping with the subject matter. We think it’s best to go for simpler fonts, as the more ornate ones tend to divide opinion. A coloured background and perhaps some simple shapes might be enough to produce something distinctive. We’d recommend erring on the side of caution rather than piling in with lots of ideas. DTP packages come packed with drop shadow, emboss and extrude effects, but these can be a sure-fire way to producing something that looks distinctly homemade.
To create a coloured box in Xara, select the Rectangle Tool and drag with the mouse. Colours are available at the bottom of the screen, and you can find more by clicking the multicoloured box in the bottom-right corner. Select the Fill tool and you can create gradient fills that blend from one colour to another. Once you start overlapping objects you’ll need to get to grips with the ordering commands that dictate which objects are above and below each other. The easiest way to do this is to click the Window menu, Control Bars and enable the Arrange control bar. This has buttons to bring an object to the front, back, forwards one or backwards one.
You may also want to incorporate a web address, date or a small slogan, known as a strapline. You could even incorporate an image as a background, but be careful to avoid anything too busy or it will distract from the headline.
STRUCTURAL ASSETS
It’s useful to draw out a grid to fit the main content into. An A4 page is usually too wide for a single block of text that covers its entire width, so it’s best to divide it into columns. Narrower columns make it easier to find the next line of text, so the more columns you have, the smaller the font size you can get away with. However, more columns also mean more white space between them, so you won’t necessarily fit more words on the page.
One way to accomplish this is to add some guides to your document. These repeat on each page, making it easy to maintain the same layout across a multi-page document. Click the Window menu, Bars and make sure that Rulers is enabled. This shows rulers along the top and left edge of the workspace so you can measure out the guides’ exact positions. Select the Selector Tool (with an arrow icon), then drag from either ruler on to the page and a dotted red line will appear. This is a guide, which won’t appear in print but is used to organise your design. Type 1 on the number pad to toggle guides on and off. It’s also useful to snap objects to the guides - toggle this on and off by typing 2. Measure with the ruler to keep the columns and borders symmetrical, and don’t forget to include horizontal rulers to mark out where the content starts and stops on the page.
INSIDE THE BOX
Xara Page & Layout Designer (but not Photo & Graphic Designer) has an alternative method for generating a grid of text columns. Click the green box that’s included by default in new documents - this is a text box, which we’ll cover in more detail below. Resize it to set the outer margins of your document. As you move it, guides will appear to show when it’s positioned in the centre of the page. Select the Text tool, right-click inside the box, select Columns and choose the number of columns and the width of the gap between them. You can then use these to position your guides without having to calculate their sizes.
When designing newsletters it’s often tempting to pack as much information on the page as possible. However, don’t underestimate the importance of white space. A decent border around the edges will usually look neater, and space between the masthead and text columns works well too. We’ve used a 20mm border and gap between the two columns in our newsletter design (above), and slightly less for our brochure (opposite). Some upmarket magazines use vast areas of white space, with elements dotted around here and there. It can look great, but it will obviously increase your paper costs.
While you’re designing the overall layout, consider whether you need any additional features at the bottom of the page. You might want to put the page number, date or a web link there, or perhaps some contact details. Just having a strip of colour to tie in with the masthead can help to pull the design together. Xara Page & Layout Designer can generate page numbers automatically via the Insert, Page number menu command.
For page numbers and any other elements that repeat on every page, right-click and select Repeat on all pages. This not only copies the element to existing pages but also to any new ones that you create. Any changes made to one iteration will be reflected on all other pages. When you delete something from one page - such as the page number from the first page - you’ll be given the option to delete or keep other instances.
As you start to build up your design, it’s worth organising objects into layers. That way you can put the parts that don’t change from one issue to the next on their own layer and lock them so they’re not edited accidentally.
Locate the Page & Layer Gallery on the right and click the pin icon so it’s always visible. Double-click the page that’s shown to reveal the layers contained within. Click the New Layer button to create as many as you need. Double-click a layer title to rename it, and click the icons beside each layer to lock, hide or solo (which hides everything bar that layer). Click the arrow next to a layer to reveal the objects contained within, and to drag them to another layer. Guides also appear on their own layer, so you can lock and hide them here too.
GRAPHIC CONTENT
Images are critical to the success of a design. People may or may not read a headline but they can’t fail to notice an image. As such, images act as entry points for an article, and for the document as a whole. People’s faces are particularly engaging; get a picture of someone doing something unusual and interesting and your audience will be hooked.
It’s a good idea to include a caption with every image. It may be obvious what the subject of the image is, but most often someone will look at an image first, the caption second, the headline third and then decide whether to read the article. A strong caption can act as another bit of bait to draw the reader in.
If you’re writing a newsletter it’s not always possible to control the quality of the photos you have to work with, especially if you’re relying on other volunteers to supply them. If you’re writing about an event that is yet to happen, it’s quite likely that the photos are yet to be taken, although you may be able to recycle some from last year.
Still, don’t rule out basic snaps taken with a smartphone. Image quality might be a bit ropey when viewed on a large computer screen, but once they’re resized to a couple of inches across it can be hard to tell the difference. It’s more likely that the subject will get lost when shrinking photos down to fit a small space, so don’t be afraid to crop photos heavily. 300 pixels per inch is generally regarded as being as sharp as the eye can see for printed documents, and an 8-megapixel photo can fill an A4 page at this resolution. Admittedly, most compact and smartphone cameras’ output isn’t pixel-sharp, but you should find that you can crop in to a small detail and still maintain high image quality. While you’re at it, straightening the horizon and adjusting colours, perhaps to lift the brightness of mid-tones, can make a huge difference.
There are lots of image editors that can do this and much more, such as the free Google Picasa. Xara has some useful image-editing tools built in, too. Drag and drop a JPEG into Xara to import it. Double-click it to reveal colour-correction tools along the top of the screen and cropping handles around the image itself.
If you don’t have suitable images at your disposal, you could head for your DTP package’s clip art collection. Clip art illustrations have a distinctly homely feel, though - that might be what you’re after, but they’re best avoided if you want a more professional appearance.
Stock image libraries such as iStock and Fotolia might be a better option. Costs can vary widely but as a rule you’d need to use the service regularly to get the best prices. Another option is Creative Commons, which is a licensing platform where people allow their photos to be used for free with certain restrictions.
WORD UP
Text may be the least exhilarating part of a design project, but in many ways it’s the most important. It certainly presents the biggest opportunities to mess things up.
Xara has two types of text objects: simple and paragraph. Select the Text Tool, click anywhere in the document and start typing, and you’re creating a simple text object. This is useful for headlines, web addresses and other short text objects. The main advantage is that you can resize the text simply by dragging the corner handles. Make sure the padlock next to the horizontal and vertical sizes is ticked if you want to prevent the letters becoming squashed or stretched.
For longer blocks of text, it’s best to create a paragraph object. Select the Text Tool and drag to create a box on the page. Type into this box and the text will automatically flow on to the next line when it reaches the right edge. Resize the box and text will reflow rather than resize. Enable snapping to guides and you can make each text box fit the guides exactly. Multiple paragraph boxes can be linked so that text flows from one to the other. To do this, drag from the red arrow at the bottom-right to another box.
When it comes to fonts, we recommend you choose a small selection and stick to it. Typically a newsletter might use a bold font for headlines and then one serif and one sans serif font for everything else. Serif fonts have short lines at the end of each stroke, while sans serif fonts don’t. If you need more variation, perhaps to differentiate between subheadings, body text and captions, try to use families of fonts - many include variations such as light, bold, italic, condensed and so on.
Fonts say a lot about a publication, with designs that range from traditional to modern, minimal to ornate, conservative to unconventional. The more ornate a font is, the larger it will need to be in order to be legible. Our advice is to go for simple, elegant designs that do the job without drawing attention to themselves.
SIZING UP
There are lots of other things to consider. Font size is pretty important, and newcomers to DTP often choose a size that’s unnecessarily big. Word documents tend to be created using font sizes between 10 and 12 point, but most magazines use sizes between 7 and 9 point. It depends on the specific font, though, so the only way to get an idea of how it will look is to print it out. In fact, that’s a good idea for every part of the design, but particularly so for text legibility.
Smaller font sizes look more polished and professional to our eyes, but bear in mind that they won’t suit everyone. The government’s guidelines for accessible communication formats (tinyurl.com/ddafont) recommend a minimum of 12 point, with 16 point for people with a visual impairment.
The space between the lines (known as leading) and between individual letters (kerning) can also affect legibility. In most cases the default settings work pretty well for paragraph text, but it’s worth experimenting with these for headlines and so on.
Kerning is also affected by your choice of justification setting. The convention is for magazines to use left justify and for newspapers to use full justify, where lines of text are spaced out to fill the line and create a neat right edge. We always prefer left justify, but it’s a matter of taste.
Also think about how much space there is between paragraphs. Websites and home-printed documents often use a double space but professional publications usually have a single space with an indentation to mark the beginning of a paragraph. This lets you fit more on the page and is usually perfectly legible. To do this in Xara, select the text and adjust the marker that appears in the ruler.
If you want to include a larger gap between paragraphs, the Space Before or Space After controls let you be more precise than simply hitting Return twice after each paragraph. These controls are extremely useful for headlines and subheadings, too. It’s much better to build these gaps into the style of the text rather than trying to adjust it ad-hoc for each headline. Xara’s leading control is shown as a percentage value (100% is the default) on the text toolbar, while its other spacing controls are revealed when you hover over the button marked ‘ab’.
We’d urge caution when experimenting with colour for text. A splash of colour is great for logos and headlines, but for paragraph text it’s best to stick with black. Colours are printed by creating a pattern of primary coloured ink, and so anything other than pure black, cyan, magenta or yellow won’t be as crisp when printed out.
Once you’ve sorted out all the settings for your fonts, save them as a text style so you can apply them quickly to any text. To do this in Xara, select the text in question, click the drop-down box next to the font size, select Create Style and give it a memorable name.
FINISHING TOUCHES
As the design comes together you can start to focus on the details. In publishing, a word that sits on its own line at the end of a paragraph is known as an orphan, and it looks a bit lonely all by itself. Most professional publications (including this one) will eliminate them with a bit of subtle tweaking earlier in the paragraph, perhaps by pushing a word over to the next line. This is done by typing Ctrl-Return, which inserts something called a soft return. It starts a new line but doesn’t insert any indention, wider gap or any other rule you’ve set up to define the start of a new paragraph. Soft returns are also useful for hyphenated words that can look odd when split over two lines, and also for tidying up the right edges of paragraphs that look a bit messy.
You’ll also notice that in professional publications text always runs to the bottom of the page. There may be areas of intentional white space, but you won’t find a column that stops a few lines short because there wasn’t enough text to fill the space.
To achieve this, it’s often necessary to lay out the page and then reduce the word count a little for a perfect fit. That’s a valuable exercise in itself, to keep the text short and snappy. If you’re really struggling to fit the last few words on to a k page, you could cheat and reduce the kerning very slightly on one or two carefully chosen lines.
Make sure you get someone else to proof-read a document before it’s printed. It doesn’t matter how good your spelling, grammar and attention to detail are, there will always be the odd error you become blind to because you know what you meant when you typed it. Don’t rely on spellcheckers as they don’t know what you’re trying to say. Look out for double spaces and try to be consistent about whether captions and subheadings have full stops at the end.
There are a few other techniques that you might want to try. Including the author’s name and perhaps even a photo of his or her face can make an article seem more personal and approachable. A pull quote is a short excerpt of text that’s reproduced at a larger size. It serves a similar purpose to an image, catching the reader’s eye and encouraging them to read the main text. It’s also a chance to break up large blocks of text, and perhaps to add a splash of colour. Boxouts are useful, too, both in terms of content and presentation. They’re ideal for text that doesn’t sit neatly in the main body, and provide another way to break up the page. Many people read boxouts first, so make sure they make sense without the reader having to read other parts first.
Text and images don’t necessarily have to be arranged in discrete rectangular blocks and, if you so wish, images can break out of the confines of the columns you defined for text. Right-click an image or any other object in Xara and select Repel text under, and any overlapping text will be pushed out of the way. You may need to bring the image object to the front using the Arrange toolbar in order for this to work. Right-click again and select Repelling & Anchoring to adjust how much of a gap there is between the image and the text.
Text can also work well when overlaid across an image, although this requires an area of the image where there isn’t much going on. Obscuring the photo’s main subject doesn’t look so good, and a busy background texture can make the text hard to read. However, an area of sky or an out-of-focus background can work really well. If you’re using white text on a coloured background, check that it’s legible when printed out.
Above all, remember that your primary objective is to engage the reader. There should be an overriding mood to the colours, images, font style and general layout that ties in with the message you want to convey. That way, if the reader likes the look of your newsletter or brochure, there’s a fair chance they’ll like the content, too.