Newsletter Layout Basics

Carl Shank • October 14, 2021

What makes up a good newsletter? There are both CONTENT and LAYOUT issues to consider.


CONTENT. Make the newsletter concise, readable, active by using strong verbs, scannable, up-to-date, people oriented, and economical. Make it regular, weekly if possible. "Scannable" means easy to read and see main pieces of information. Tie broader interests into the lives of local people. This is especially important if you reference, in a church newsletter, for instance, denominational or national news and views. Include short snippets by others in your group of readers. Advertise links to well-researched and important information for your readers. Include an occasional literary piece or arts piece to cultivate creative interchange and add vitality and dimension to your newsletter. Every so often use special interest pieces. Make sure the source of the newsletter is clear and readable, including name, address, date, staff. Do not plagiarize — give credit to where credit is due.


LAYOUT.  Have a distinctive and well-designed logo. Hire a graphic artist if needed for a professional logo look. Make sure the newsletter has "visual vitality" — good paper stock, quality reproduction, eye-catching headlines, plenty of white space and graphic elements to break up long text. Other type considerations would be —


(1) Choose the right typeface. Don't be limited to Times Roman, Helvetica and ghastly Courier. Try Palatino, Century, Lucida and Stone Informal. Book faces would include Garamond, Caslon 540, Galliard and Baskerville. (See Example 1 below) Choose a face legible in small sizes. Whatever you choose, be careful of fanciful, grotesque, weird and strange faces for most of the newsletter. "Extreme features—thick strokes, very thin strokes, tall and narrow forms, short and squatty forms, slanted characters, fancy serifs, swashes—anything that calls attention to itself lowers the readability of the face, because you notice the letterforms, rather than the message." (Robin Williams, "Improving Readability," Technique, August 1995). What you want is readability, cleanness, and communication.


(2) Size type to fit. This means appropriate size of type and line spacing. Strive for lines between 50 and 70 characters. Another way to say this would be from 8 to 11 words or wide enough to accommodate 2 1/2 lowercase alphabets of the typeface chosen. People read groups of words at a time, so be careful of too few or too many words on a line. Do not double-space between the end of sentences (an old practice on typewriters—remember those?!) For a piece too long, hyphenate lines setting them ragged right, or cut some text. For a piece too short, remove hyphenations, break long paragraphs into shorter ones, or narrow the column widths. The general rule for leading is 20 percent of type size, so 2 points of leading for 10-point type, making a total of 12 points from one baseline to the next. However, some faces require more leading for readability. Since we read in phrases, avoid uneven letter and word spacing, or too close or too far apart spacing. Kerning and tracking controls on page layout programs like PageMaker often need tweaked. (See Example 2 below) Whatever looks right is important here.


(3) Use display type for headlines. Do not use all capital letters. A mix of upper and lower case letters gives more readability and pleasure in headline reading. Generally, avoid ALL CAPS even for headlines. Leave conjunctions such as and, in, and the, lowercase. There are many display faces available, but I would say choose a display face that goes with the text used in the piece. Sans serif faces (without "feet") are often good display faces, but again be careful of gaudiness. And use your computer program's kerning function (space between letters) to create visual acceptability —


WORKING TOOLS or Working Tools (Formata Bold font),

but not WORKING TOOLS (unless it is a Halloween piece!)


Also, end lines at logical stopping points —

Today it will be sunny with periods

of rain and spotty showers Not this — but rather this —


Today it will be sunny

with periods of rain

and spotty showers


Trademark or copyright symbols should be a smaller type size than the font and move the symbol so that its top aligns with the top of the text. (Example 3 below)


(4)  Replace typewriter-type quotations and other marks with the font's built in marks. (Example 4 below) Jim Heid from Macworld also rightly advises "avoid gimmicky font styles such as shadow and outline. Also think twice about using the small-caps option that many programs provide. . . . avoid superimposing type over a gray-shaded background." (Macworld, June 1989) (Example 5 below)


Successful Layout & Design

Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble?

By Carl Shank • February 12, 2026
Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble? The latest Google estimate of available fonts is over 300,000 and counting. Other estimates have catalogued over 550,000 fonts. There are over 36,000 font families, over 4,000 type designers and over 2,700 professional font foundries, not counting smaller font entrepreneurs like CARE Typography, which provides restored fonts from yesteryear. (Quora source https://www.quora.com/How-many-fonts-are-there-in-existence-Does-any-group-attempt-to-keep-a-record-of-all-the-fonts-that-exist ) There are commercial fonts from sources like Adobe and MyFonts (Monotype) which require payment for their use in various platforms. Both provide a subscription service, which usually requires a substantial monthly or yearly fee to download and use their fonts. When I began using Apple Macintoshes in the 1980s, font manufacturers like Adobe and Monotype would “sell” the right to use a number of their fonts for thousands of dollars. And, by the way, you never really “own” the font. You have paid only for the use of the font for a specific purpose or machine. Moreover, the price varies for print use, or web use, or a digital ad use. Even today, the font Trinité Titling by Bram de Does, used in a number of Bibles and biblical studies, costs over $4,000 for the use on a single computer and much more for a number of computer users. Individual users of such fonts are mostly priced out of their budget. Why the seemingly extravagant cost? We had a valve on one of our household plumbing lines go bad. I called the plumber, and he replaced the valve — at a cost of several hundred dollars, while the valve itself cost only a few dollars. Was that fair? Yes, because I was paying for the time and training and effort going into replacing that valve in my house. The same holds true for professional font designers. They spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours in font development. We are paying for their livelihood. Font licenses cover four basic parameters around font usage — “The What: The weight and style of the typeface; The Where: Literally where you’ll use the font – a website, digital ad, or in print; The Who: The number times a font can be installed on a computer (aka the number of people who can use it); The How many: For example, web font licenses describe the number of allotted page views, and app and digital marketing licenses set similar parameters.” (Monotype Report) Companies like Monotype are rarely concerning with an individual using a font for a home, individualized project, but rather an entire design company or printer using that font for commercial gain and advertising dollars. There are fonts available “for personal use only,” prohibiting their use for commercial or money-making projects. There are what have been called “shareware” fonts, fonts with a minimal cost which require attribution of the type designer or provider on projects. Most fonts provide a EULA, or font license, which outlines and determines the legal restrictions and ramifications for their use. What about free fonts? Monotype warns against using unlicensed or what are called “free” fonts for several valid reasons, but, in my opinion, this is an obvious ploy to get the user to buy or subscribe to their font services. One Monotype report cites six issues associated with what are deemed “free” fonts. Free fonts may pop up in similar ads or designs to industry competition, perhaps prompting a lawsuit or cease-and-desist actions. Free fonts often have the inability to scale, add special characters, or even different alphabets. Free fonts have limited creative scope. They may be saddled with malware or software viruses. Poor font design can be a problem with such fonts. A sixth problem with so-called free fonts is that they can be actually “pirated” fonts, copied from legitimately designed fonts. “Aside from branding issues, free fonts also suffer from a whole host of performance issues. Fonts are software files that interact with applications and the operating system on which it’s installed; without the guidance of a skilled font engineer, rendering issues may arise from crashing glyphs, or a lack of proper kerning (the space between glyphs) text in certain scenarios. A free font downloaded from a random website might not support a broad range of languages and or complex scripts (e.g., Japanese or Arabic), or basic diatrics to cover commonly used Latin languages.” (Monotype Report) Monotype maintains that free fonts won’t give a company the individual style it deserves to help it stand out in the marketplace. They also point to the legal ramifications involved with font licensing, not a glamorous subject but one in which company attorneys are hired to examine for possible litigation. Types of Free Fonts There are four sources of free fonts — Open Source fonts with an SIL Open Font License (SEE https://openfontlicense.org ); OS fonts, fonts that come with your operating system and hardware; Subscription add-on fonts that come as an add-on to a subscription service; and, advertised free fonts by independent font designers, such as CARE Typography. Many or most of such free fonts come from freeware, shareware, public domain or demo fonts downloaded or reconstructed from an archive or library, like Internet Archive. Companies such as Website Planet offer free “commercial” fonts, fonts that can be used in business and corporate applications. See https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/best-free-fonts/. Several cautions, however, are still in order here. First, a font that “looks like” a standard, business font is not the same thing as its “older brother.” An example is Website Planet’s Playfair Display font, both a variable and static font designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen licensed under the SIL Open Font License agreement. Yet, this font looks a lot like the standard Bodoni font, created by Giambattista Bodoni in 1767 and revived by Morris Fuller Benton in 1911 under Linotype’s commercial license.

More On The Greek Font

By Carl Shank • December 23, 2025
More on the Greek font. In a previous post ( It's Greek To Me! March 18, 2023) we noted that Cursive Greek type appeared as a chancery script by Francesco Griffo in 1502 and lasted two hundred years. Robert Bringhurst notes that "chancery Greeks were cut by many artists from Garamond to Cason, but Neoclassical and Romantic designers . . . all returned to simpler cursive forms . . . in the English speaking world the cursive Greek most often seen is the one designed in 1806 by Richard Porson." This face has been the "standard Greek face for the Oxford Classical Texts for over a century." ( Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, Version 3.1, 2005 , pp. 274, 278) In fact, asking Google for the best Greek face to use, it points us to Porson Greek. Porson is a beautiful Unicode Font for Greek. It's not stiff, like many of the cleaner fonts, which are usually san serif. It is bold and easy to read and seems to more closely match the orthography in newer textbooks. (Jan 8, 2004) 
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