ThomTurner.com might go through an aesthetic overhaul to make it more, well, aesthetic. I am looking at highlighting the portfolio first and the blog second. All through the power of Wordpress…
Where to begin when you are designing a church newsletter? I am going to be finishing up a church newsletter for The Plant that I have “story boarded,” so to speak, outlined, and I am ready to GIMP and Scribus it away.
These are the steps I have been following to come to my final design concept.
1) Keep your branding. Branding is so important to creating a cohesive, unified symbol of a church community. The newsletter should share branding with the website, the pew cards, the stationary, etc. If everything looks different it just turns cheesy.
2) Look at other examples. Church newsletters can run the gambit from spruced up letter to blown out magazine. It varies. Find some you like and…
3) Choose a mode that fits your community’s culture. Your newsletter should be an example of your church. The product should reflect the zeitgeist of the church community.
4) Open Source it. Let church members have the opportunity to send pictures or stories to you for inclusion in the newsletter.
5) Design away…
We’ll find out if they work right!
Someone at work sent me this cartoon and I created the other version below it. Must be bipartisan about these sorts of things!



I designed the header for Black Coffee Reflections.
See Tim’s special thank you to Todd Heistand, who designed the awesome theme used on BCR and Emergent Mid-Atlantic, and myself.