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Home » the forums » Ministry Help » Design Critique

Please critique my church newsletter

Submitted by christopherandb... on January 9, 2008 - 2:51am.

My wife Barbara and I have been doing our church newsletter for the past year. We asked our church to critique the look and feel of the newsletter, but everyone who critiqued the newsletter said it look great. No suggestion how can we make it better, or why do they like it. So we are asking to Geeks and God community to critique our church newsletter. Please give us some feedback, here is the link The Shalom.pdf.

Thank you

May God's Peace be with you all!!
Remember to live your life with a purpose with God in mind.

Chris Williams
Webstewards & evangelism chair
Peace Lutheran Ministries Sacramento Ca

‹ Please critique our church sermon podcast Another Newsletter Critique ›

Newsletter "The Shalom" critique/comments

Submitted by mwpeters on January 10, 2008 - 3:39am.

Chris,

I think you could improve both this newsletter's look and readability considerably by :

  • Tightening up column widths and adding a lot of white space (and or some white space and rule lines).
  • Reducing the number of font styles and sizes. Probably best to stick with one font family for serif and one for sanserif unless your design savvy about such things.
  • Scaling back on the use of stock graphic elements. My impression is you've gone a bit overboard with these. The number is distracting and too often the different elements create visual conflicts. For a start I'd stick to 1-2 on a page, maybe three under extreme circumstances if you can keep them well separated. It's possible to use more, but you need a better grasp of what works and what doesn't. I can't tell you that as I don't know how to either. If I tried to use more than a couple elements I'd have the same problems your having.

Alignment and placement of elements on the page could also use some improvement. Sorry I can't be more help at being instructive. This isn't really my area of expertise, and I'm no longer working with folks skilled at print design.

There are some good resources on the web on such matters.
Anyone here have some links for Chris??

I'm afraid I've misplaced mine. There's always Google....

Some thoughts

Submitted by Matt Farina on January 10, 2008 - 10:36am.

Here are some thoughts, but please realize I'm not a design guy either.

1) Have a maximum of 3 fonts. Keep any modifications of those like bold or italics to a minimum and only where they add to the message.

2) Cut down on the stock graphics. Use them consistently to emphasize something. They should add to the content or highlight something.

3) White space is ok. It doesn't all need to be filled.

4) Consistent margins. The right and left margins on the page don't look the same to me. They should be.

These are just a couple thoughts. This looks better than what my church puts out.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

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