Liberate Your PDF Newsletter Content. If you love your newsletter, set it free. We’ve all received them—heck, perhaps we’ve even had to (shudder) distribute them. You know what I’m talking about: PDF newsletters, sent as an email attachment to a distribution list or linked on a webpage. In some corners, they still lurk. I’m just going to say it: People use PDFs for a hundred different reasons, and about 9. News and events do not take turns. PDFs are not made for this always- happening world. They compromise search, sharing, tracking and accessibility. They are not easily navigable, not interactive, not real- time? 70 Beautiful Email Newsletter Designs. Now coming to the newsletter design. Email newsletter designs should essentially be in harmony with the content of the newsletter itself and should. I mean, what is the value to an email like this. From: . It’s like buying a new car and then putting it up on cinder blocks in your driveway. You may have great content, but publishing it as a PDF newsletter does it a disservice. It’s like buying a new car and then putting it up on cinder blocks in your driveway. You can’t do print on the web. You need to do web on the web, so your content can actually live and breathe out in the world. So. You’ve been saving up content all month/semester/year and finally – finally! Like all explosions, that is a messy and imperfect approach. By the time your PDF hits inboxes, a lot of that information is out of date. And you’re likely throwing people a lot of information that they may or may not have time for. Also, as far as your website and Google are concerned, that content either never happened or is awfully well hidden. Rather than saving everything up into a giant content brick, atomize that brick into bits of timely content that you publish on an ongoing basis, scheduled over time. One solution is a blog. Rather than saving everything up into a giant content brick, atomize that brick into bits of timely content that you publish on an ongoing basis, scheduled over time. Now, your content lives on the web — organized, relevant and shareable — and when you send an email, it can be a front door as opposed to a hoarder’s house. Eric Stoller of Inside Higher Ed recently wrote a great blog post on using Word. Press as the backend for a mobile- and social- friendly email newsletter. This series of articles and tutorials focuses on newsletter design — how to create a newsletter that looks good. The Paper Mill Store has a free template for a 4 page newsletter in InDesign, PDF, and. Here's how you can make an interactive newsletter PDF in InDesign. Disseminate a graphically interesting, beautifully designed small book. 31 Great Email Newsletter Designs. Sometimes email newsletter design isn’t given all the attention it deserves. Stephanie Hamilton details seven simple steps to designing an email newsletter template. And if you like the idea of capturing your content in a blog but want to publish it in a print- friendly format down the road, look into the Anthologize plugin for Word. Press. If you’re sending me a PDF newsletter, I’m not going to read it. Even if I wanted to, I can’t.
And the chances of me following up to read it once I’m sitting in front of a computer are slim. A perfect opportunity to convey information and value, squandered. According to research released by the Pew Internet Project last month, email remains a top task for cell phone and smartphone owners. And in the 2. 01. Noel- Levitz E- Expectations report, 8. The onus is on us to make it worth their while. This requires us to make email an effective experience in a multiple contexts, particularly mobile. And PDF does not fit the bill. It’s a big leap from PDF to mobile- friendly newsletters, so how should you get started? Dive in to this archived “Mobile Email Marketing 1. What Counts/Blue Sky Factory. Once you’re a little more acquainted, this recent blog entry on Media. Post provides some good tips for designing mobile- friendly emails. Even if you’re not doing the work yourself, it’s important to understand the considerations. Integrate Email Into Your Web Branding. I believe that PDF newsletters persist in this age of electronic self- publishing because they are relatively easy to create and distribute. We don’t want a newsletter just being sent with a default third- party template, or dollars being shelled out to a vendor to create something splashy but potentially off- brand. When creating website templates and branding guidelines for our institution, we should extend those to email newsletters, offering templates, headers and anything else that will, one, save these units time and money, and two, reinforce brand consistency. Share the Wealth. By changing your workflow so that you’re regularly publishing content on the web rather than saving it up for a print or PDF newsletter, you also open the door to more easily sharing content with communications peers on campus by virtue of more ongoing attention to your content. One department’s newsletter feature story may be one alumni magazine’s class note. Think of all the pertinent outlets — alumni magazine, central news office, school- wide publication (if you’re within a school), campus social media, even campus distribution lists — and connect with them. After all, one department’s newsletter feature story may be one alumni magazine’s class note. Freedom! Liberating your content from the confines of a PDF newsletter means not only giving the content a proper home on your website, but broadening its visibility and usefulness both on and off campus. If you’re curious about email marketing and want to learn more, check out these email marketing resources compiled by Email Marketing Info. You may also be interested in Corey Vilhauer’s recent post about email content strategy. How do you approach newsletters? Have you made the PDF to web transition? Photo by mikebaird / Flickr Creative Commons. How To Design an Email Newsletter Template in 7 Simple Steps. Email newsletters are more important than ever. If you want to reach potential and existing customers, they’re a great way to spread the word about upcoming projects, company news, and other business- related information to a large audience. In this tutorial I’ll walk you through how to create your own email newsletter template in Photoshop, taking into consideration common design patterns that prove to be effective. After you have completed this design process, you will be ready to code and style this template. Getting Started. As general practice, it’s best to design your newsletter with a fixed width instead of a fluid/liquid layout. This will prevent horizontal scroll bars as the result of not using the full width of the screen. Design your newsletter with a width of around 5. Setting up the Document in Photoshop. Open up Photoshop and create a new document with a width of 8. Be sure the color mode is RGB. For the background I filled it with a light gray. I created a container 6. I chose to fill it with white and positioned it in the center of the document. Allow the user to view the email in the browser of their choice. I added this command to the top of the newsletter in Myriad Pro 1. It’s important to give the viewer options in viewing your email as some of them might not download images from an email by default. To improve accessibility always include the option of viewing the email newsletter in their web browser. Create the Email Newsletter Header. In this tutorial I’m creating the email newsletter, The Pet Digest, to compliment my new blog called The Pet Anthology. The goal is to keep interested readers up to date with the latest goings on through a weekly bundle delivered to subscribers. Since the branding has already been established, choosing fonts, color, and graphics should be simple. The above image is the header of the blog. I’m going to retain the look and feel while making only slight modifications. I start by selecting and dragging the mascot over into the newsletter template. From there I grab the name and slogan and drag them onto the new document as well. With some minor revisions to the text, the newsletter looks like this: The fonts I used were: Slab Tall X for . Create the main part of the newsletter. Start by creating another rectangle 6. I then gather the content that will be featured on the coming weeks newsletter. Again, using the design attributes already laid out on The Pet Anthology, I create the heading using Museo Sans, drag and drop in the main image as well as copy and paste the article text. A dotted border placed underneath will separate each article field. I then duplicate the first entry twice and move them down to fill out the rest of the spots for this newsletter. I’ll place the new content in the duplicated spots shortly. Using guides, I insert the remaining two entries and erase the duplicated content. Add Social Links. I want to include an area for social network and RSS icons, as well as the ability to let the subscriber share the newsletter with friends. I start by creating a rectangle 2. I use these Social Network icons, changing the colors around to reflect my branding. Keeping in mind usability of e- newsletters I decide to keep things simple. I then duplicate the rectangle and place it to the right, including the . Include a Footer. To wrap things up, I create the footer which will allow you to get in contact with me and a link allowing you to unsubscribe from the newsletter. Every newsletter needs to have a link or a button to allow the reader to freely unsubscribe from the newsletter should they choose to. Hopefully this tutorial gave you a good idea of how to create a functional email newsletter. Let me know if you have any comments or questions about the design process! Once again, here’s a link to the post on coding an email newsletter.
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January 2017
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