Desktop publishing basics

Putting out an appealing newsletter, brochure or other print publication for your church is often not simple or easy.  Most people need some level of training on how to do it well.

Your information needs to be in an easy-to-read, eye-catching format. Good publication design delivers news and messages effectively. Take the time to understand and follow simple fundamentals of design. The end result will be a publication that is easy to quickly understand and easy on the eyes.

Layout basics

It may be fun to use the variety of colors, graphics and fonts offered with many design tools, but remember tha readability is the most important aspect of your piece. Due to the web, more people now "scan" even written text rather trhan read it.  So we need to adopt new techniques to help people find what they want and read it easily.

Easy-to-read pubs use

• A serif font for text and a sans serif font for headlines and subheads. Serif fonts have extra strokes at the end of the lines that form the letters; sans serif fonts have no extra strokes.
• A type size of 11 points or larger.
• Left-aligned margins, not justified.
• Text in columns and boxes -- not spread wide across a page.
• Grouping of related stories on a page.
• Graphics or photos that visually describe the story and draw interest. It's OK to use up to three fonts in your publication — one for text, one for headlines and one for your banner or nameplate. But suing more than three can cause clutter and look "circusy".

Headlines

Headlines (and even subheads) need to quickly tell tyhe reader what the text is about.  Avoid "cute" headlines or ones that allude to the text but don't rteally describe what's important. Articles at the top of a page normally should be larger than those lower on the page. Size and placement relates to importance.

White space

White space — the space not occupied by text or graphics — makes the page easier to read. Don't avoid it -- treat is as your friend. Cramming a page full makes it look like a tough read.  Some people avoiud tough reads. Use white space on all four margins, between columns and within text itself.

Simplify text

A rule of thumb when writing for the web is to try to delete 50% or more of the existing text. After boiling down the text to the essentials, look for "lists" of things and change them to bullets. Then break up the longer articles with subheads.
[reference: Technology for Ministry, UMCom]

New, smaller PDF Reader

Adobe products, even the free Adobe Reader, are getting attacked pretty heavily these days and experts say it's likely to continue. The security patches are coming out much too frequently for my piece of mind. So what's a great solution if your church needs a free PDF reader? Nuance PDF Reader.

Nuance now offers the free PDF Reader. It's much smaller, fast, and full of features. I have been waiting for this to come out, as my favorite PDF editing software is from Nuance also -- PDF Converter Professional. I've been testing PDF Reader ever since it was announced a few days ago. Last night I removed Adobe Reader from my computer.

Keep your church office and personal computer safer -- remove Adobe Reader and use Nuance PDF Reader instead.

PDF Converter Professional -- Acrobat replacement
Nuance was originally called ScanSoft. They are well-known for the industry-leading OminPage OCR software and for the PaperPort software  that comes with some scanners. They also produce the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software. I first learned about Nuance when researching a replacement for Adobe Acrobat for work. I am very enthusiastic about the quality and features of Nuance PDF Converter Professional. Their conversion from PDF back to an Office type file such as MS Word, is exceptionally good.

I recommend replacing Adobe Acrobat if not for the security considerations as well as pricing. My replacement is PDF Converter Professional from Nuance.

The Nuance folks tell me that Microsoft hired them to provide the file-to-PDF converter for Microsoft Office ... you may notice a "printer" called "DocuCom" or "DocuCom PDF driver" -- that's done by Nuance.  Out of that PDF Converter program grew PDF Converter Professional, a full-blown, powerful PDF editor as well as converter.

PDF Converter Professional is much less expensive that Adobe Acrobat and has the features that businesses and churches need. Why pay the outrageous amount Adobe asks for Acrobat? Even with a church discount through the UMC TechShop, Acrobat is twice as expensive as PDF Converter Professional.

Making websites that are evangelistic

Websites offer us incredible power to share the Good News. But to make use of this potential, we must understand
these six issues:

• The nature of the Internet -- It is a pull medium.
• There is no automatic audience for any website.
• There are only three ways that someone will find a site:
• using a search engine
• following a link from another website
• by a personal recommendation – in an email, on a contact card, in print, TV/radio etc.
Read more ...