Pausing for a Breath

I regularly read Penelope Trunk, a career-advice columnist with the Boston Globe and author of the Brazen Careerist. While her subject matter is sometimes off the wall and her manner of delivery is even more so, I still find her informative, educational and applicable.
PT, as she’s often referred to by her blog followers, recently wrote [...]

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Politics from the Pulpit?

I’m a writer, not a preacher, so I can’t authorize what comes from the pulpit. But “Politics from the Church Newsletter” just doesn’t have the ring to it, and as we all know, it’s all in the headline.
No matter. Whether it’s from the pulpit or the newsletter, the same thought applies: Politics are a no-no.
As [...]

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No Shop Talk

As a web designer, I frequently peruse online forums to further my knowledge. And as one of the “older set” (meaning IT definitions were not the first words from my mouth), I sometimes have problems understanding the language.
Like, what is this?
“CSS is a stylesheet format for HTML, XHTML, and XML, including SVG and XUL, [...]

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Save the Sermon for Sunday

Have I mentioned we don’t read much? One of the greatest mistakes in church communication, especially in newsletters, is length. Verbose preaching. Wordiness. If the article is too long, the average reader won’t give it a glance.
And so we continue on with Church Newsletter 202, with a focus on maintaining the reader’s attention.
Writing for a [...]

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Church Newsletter 202: Font

“Typography exists to honor content,” writes Robert Bringhurst in the designer’s bible “The Elements of Typographic Style.”
Typography, typefaces, fonts…we hear these terms often in the design world. Technically they are not all the same. For our purposes, however, we won’t go into such mundane details. Just know that the visual appearance of your words is [...]

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Church Newsletter 202: Layout

Okay, we’ve got the imagery. We’ve got the font. Now let’s lay out the newsletter.
Studies show—yes, people have actually tracked readers’ eye movements—that layout of the newsletter greatly influences its legibility. Our eyes naturally read from left to right so think of our reading pattern as a large “Z” over the page. Often a designer [...]

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Church Newsletter 202: Imagery

We’ve determined newsletters play an important role in church communications. We’ve also covered the basics of creating that important newsletter. Now, let’s get into the nitty gritty of attracting those readers.
Imagery
While there are many elements of good newsletter design, first and foremost is the fact that a newsletter must be more than words. As [...]

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Church Newsletter 101

Outside Sunday bulletins, the church newsletter is perhaps the most common form of communication to your congregation. As much as churches vary from one another, so do the newsletters they publish. From electronic versions to traditional hard copies, the one common thread is that most of them aren’t getting read.
Let’s be real here.
We’re [...]

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