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The top newsletter design story is Photoshop.
While the photos provided for many newsletter are not professionally done, Photoshop can often make imperfect snapshots better than acceptable. It has filters that sharpen, improve contrast and enhance color. In addition, after being drawn traditionally, Photoshop helps paint cartoons and other styles of illustrations more quickly than any other method I know.
         In the content packed 3-page interior spread shown below, a good design strategy is to keep the reader's eye moving by sprinkling images and consistent design elements around a dominant central key visual. This serves to stabilize and balance the layout.
         Here, the central visual is a labeled aerial shot of the grounds. It works well to welcome and help potential visitors navigate this very large and complicated facility. Once again, Photoshop turned what could have been an extravagantly unreasonable investment into a practical and worthwhile effort. Because the original photo's visual qualities looked so out of place with other images on the spread, it appeared to be unuseable. Either a re-shoot or an original illustration would be needed. Instead, with the help of Photoshop's filters and retouching tools, a textural illustrative look that complimented the other elements was achieved in about four hours.
         It could be that there are other digital image manipulation programs as good as this great product from Adobe Systems. If so, they should also receive huge accolades for their contribution to publication design.

Shape your newsletter into a publication that gets noticed.
The look of a design suggests the degree of quality that can be found in the content. That is, interest in actually reading something can be influenced by how much care appears to have been invested in a publication's look. In other words, credibility can be expected for doing a good job. Immediate disapproval is the risk we take when presenting a poorly designed piece. It follows that well done design is a goal that helps ensure successful performance.
         Mixing image shapes can add visual excitement to any publication. Hard edged rectangles, partial hard edged rectangles, irregular shapes, silhouettes, partial silhouettes and soft airbrushed edges in various combinations are used on these newsletter page designs. Such treatments makes their interaction with type much more interesting than if the images were limited to only rectanglular shapes. Circles, triangles, hexagons and other geometric shapes can also add the kind of visual life that will get a design noticed.

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