7 Layout Tips
Carl Shank • January 15, 2021
7 Layout Tips for Your Next Piece
How do I produce a newsletter that is inviting, eye-catching and easy to read? What are the time-honored rules of layout and design that will help me? This is a vast topic, to be sure, but here are seven (7) basic rules to give attention to for you to "look good" in print and digital media.
- Know where you are going. Have a good understanding of the goals and purpose of your piece. What do you want to accomplish through this piece? Here, "form" follows "function." Roger Parker in his Looking Good In Print notes: "There should be a logical reason for the way you employ every graphic tool. That tool should relate to the idea it expresses as well as the environment in which the final product will appear." (p. 4)
- Place the right fonts and graphics well. There are time-honored rules for mixing and using different fonts, or typefaces, in a piece. Most print pieces use a serif (with "feet") font for the main text and a sans-serif (without "feet") font for headlines. This rule has been used successfully for ages, but digital use has relaxed the rules somewhat. The issue here is readability. What should stand out, stands out, and what should be read for information is clear. Clarity, organization and simplicity should rule.
- Guide the reader through your piece. "The design of that map [a reading roadmap] should follow the readers' natural tendency to read an advertisement or publication from upper left to lower right." (p. 6)
- Use plenty of what is called "white space." Don't try to crowd into a piece all that can or even should be said. Separate headings from text, points from one another, and use sufficient white space to separate graphics from textual elements. If it looks "crowded" it probably is crowded.
- Don't try to "show off" in your piece. This is not "art for art's sake" or to show your ability to mix colors and fonts and graphics or to display your talents. This is to get the point across in the most direct and pleasing way possible.
- Pay attention to spelling and grammar. Probably the most overlooked and underrated truth about many newsletters is that they ignore proper spelling and the right use of grammatical constructs. Buy a "style manual" and consult it for proper sentence, paragraph and topical styles, especially if you footnote something. By the way — be especially careful of plagiarizing. This is unfortunately a major "sin" in church and ministry communications. Give credit to where credit is due.
- Use spell checkers and layout helps. Microsoft and Adobe and many other publishers have publishing helps and advice which you should give attention to and use and adapt for your needs.
Hopefully, these introductory points will help your publications shine!
Successful Layout & Design
Google’s variable font selection includes IBM Plex Sans, Inter, Newsreader, Open Sans, Playfair Display, Express Fraunces and Roboto. FF Meta Variable is now a licensed font from Monotype (myFonts.com). Formata Variable is a demonstration only font from CARE Typography. We consider two Google Variable typefaces here — Playfair Display and Express Fraunces. Playfair Display Playfair Display is a high-contrast transitional/display serif typeface designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen and released through Google Fonts in 2011. It was designed primarily for large display sizes, especially headlines, titles, and editorial typography. Its appearance draws inspiration from the late eighteenth-century transition from traditional broad-nib writing toward pointed steel pens, as well as from the elegant typefaces associated with the European Enlightenment and neoclassical period. Playfair Display is a contemporary high-contrast serif designed primarily for display typography. Its visual ancestry lies in the 18th-century transitional period, particularly the movement from broad-nib calligraphic forms toward the sharper, more vertical forms that ultimately produced Didot and Bodoni.
More On Variable Fonts Open Type Variable Fonts ( REFERENCE ) (Some of this Blog from previous Blog on Dec 9. 2025. See REFERENCE above) Open Type Variable fonts build directly on the technology introduced to TrueType by Apple in the QuickDraw GX graphics environment. Of similar vintage, Adobe’s multiple master format approached similar concepts in a different way. How do we know that Variable Fonts don’t also have a declining future? The need for more compact dynamic webfonts is part of the answer. “Variable fonts also have the potential to enable new kinds of typography for electronic documents, responsive to things like device orientation or even viewing distance. Compact and faster fonts also provide significant advantages for embedding fonts in devices, especially for East Asian (CJK) and other fonts with very large glyph sets and character coverage. The smaller device and disc footprint of variable fonts has been a major factor in encouraging support for the technology in software companies.” ( https://medium.com/variable-fonts ) An Open Type Variable font contains one or more axes that each provide particular variation between different extremes of a typeface design. The format also allows for the possibility of intermediate designs, for the whole glyph set or for individual glyphs, to provide finer control over the design as it changes across the variations design space. Unlike MM fonts, an Open Type Variable font contains only a single set of glyph outlines “and the other extremes or intermediate shapes are defined as deltas from those outlines. So, for example, a font may contain a set of glyph outlines that correspond to the regular weight and width of a typeface, and the lighter, heavier, narrower, and extended designs will be expressed in the font data as movements of outline nodes relative to that outline.” (Medium.com) Any position within the design space can be a named instance. Variable fonts allow a continuous design space containing potentially thousands or millions of possible instances. For typography, this means greater control over hierarchy, responsive design, spacing, readability, branding, and visual expression, while often requiring fewer font files.
