Newsletter design and print

Scope

Lands Village Hall Trust is a small community charity centred around a local village hall. The Trustees decided to update the charity’s outlook and make it more central to the life of the village community. Part of this strategy was to distribute a newsletter to inform the residents about what the Trust was doing.

The Trust approached us to design and layout the newsletter while they provided the contents.

The Trust wanted a modern, fresh design that used their branding colour scheme, logo, and appearance. It was important for the charity to limit the cost of print production, and it was essential for the sponsor of the newsletter to have space.

To demonstrate that the charity was viable and professional, the Trust decided it wanted to have a professional design and print service rather than something printed at home on an A4 sheet of paper. The scope of the project included the design and layout, image manipulation, and printing.

Our solution

In consultation with the Trust, we decided to use a design providing blocks for various stories and lists. We focussed on a design that utilised a similar colour scheme to that used on the web site and in the logo. The newsletter’s background included separate areas of white, green, and grey. These areas visually separated different parts of the newsletter from each other, and the unusual angles used in some of the intersections created tension in the design.

The masthead across the top of the design included a monochrome image of the village hall with coloured highlights of emphasis. This technique is reminiscent of the new web site design, the Trust’s brand, and ties the Trust into the village’s history.

We were careful with typography to ensure the newsletter was legible and suitable for print. For this reason, we were unable to use the typefaces used by the Trust on its web site: these were not pragmatic for readability at printed sizes and were technically awkward to print. To aid legibility, we chose a seriffed body text font and used a sans-serif font for headings. The differentiation between body text and headlines enabled us to reduce title sizes, providing us more negative space and larger text areas.

Successes

The newsletter was printed and distributed throughout the catchment area of the village hall.

All feedback received by the Trust was positive. The newsletter helped the Trust establish its new web site and contact details for the Trustees. The weekend the newsletter was distributed witnessed a tenfold spike in traffic to the charity’s web site and increased activity on the new Facebook™ page.

Challenges

The Trust limited the size of the newsletter to a double–sided A4 print to reduce print costs for the sponsor. This limitation created a challenge to place the content provided to us within the defined space while maintaining ample negative space around stories. Through the use of typography and precise layout, we were able to create a suitable design.

The Trust wanted the newsletter folded into a Z–fold for delivery. For the success of this fold, we had to make sure the masthead would be visible above the fold. We decided the masthead should take up the top one–third of the first side to accommodate this.

Impacts of the project

The local community engaged with the newsletter, and the Trust received a demonstrable boost in activity following its distribution. The Trust’s web site and social media profiles also saw increased activity.

We were pleased to provide the Trust with an affordable and professional print run.

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