by Stacy Kissinger Leeds

Redesigning a newsletter can be a challenging and exciting process. The designer faces myriad choices-fonts, graphics, color schemes, page sizes, column sizes, paper-and must combine these elements to produce a design that reflects the personality of the chapter.

The reality check that constrains the whole design process is the printing budget. Finding a design that you both like and can afford can be a daunting task.

The staff of Technicalities, the newsletter of STC's Rocky Mountain chapter (RMC), ran head-on into reality this summer. We had a recently redesigned four-color newsletter that was well received by chapter members. But our printing firm was suddenly no longer willing to provide four-color printing at reduced cost in exchange for advertising. And four-color printing costs were prohibitive.

So we were faced with redesigning the newsletter again-less than a year after the first redesign. Now that chapter members were used to a four-color newsletter, could we come up with an affordable design that would measure up to expectations?

What we found was that we could retain a four-color look without breaking the budget. How? By using a four-color cover shell and single-color interior. Here's a look at how we arrived at this choice, how the choice dictated design changes, and the implications the choice has had on the newsletter layout and printing efforts.

Using a Print Broker
While newsletter staff members had experience with printing, none of us were print experts. After brainstorming design and printing possibilities on our own, we recruited the help of an experienced print broker. We found our print broker based on the recommendation of an experienced design firm. Our print broker, like most, received a commission from the printing house, so we paid nothing for her services. (If you want to find a print broker, get recommendations from graphic artists, design firms, or printers that you have worked with, or look in the Yellow Pages under "Printing Brokers.")

The broker was able to explain the printing options available to us. She translated our needs into "printer-speak" and rounded up bids for the various options from several local printers.

Weighing Our Choices
We examined printing costs on options ranging from one-color through full four-color printing. As expected, full four-color printing costs were prohibitive regardless of the printer. But, surprisingly, we found a partial four-color option that was affordable: retain four-color on the cover and back cover, while using single-color for all interior pages.

To do this, the four-color cover is printed as a "shell" that contains standard newsletter features, such as our chapter logo, the STC logo, and a contents area showing the regular newsletter sections. We print a half-year's worth of these shells at a time (printing three issues for our 800-plus members translates to about 2,500 copies) to take advantage of bulk pricing. Then, for each individual issue, the shell is overprinted with issue-specific text, and single-color interior pages are printed and bound into the shell.

This option offers us the best of both worlds-a four-color look and feel at an economical price. But the existing newsletter design had to be modified to accommodate both the shell overprinting step and the single-color interior.

Modifying the Design
First, we selected the single-color print ink. Rather than standard black, we selected a very dark blue (Pantone 2768C).

At 100 percent, this color is almost black, providing easy-to-read body text; at lesser percentages (for example, 10 and 50 percent), this blue prints light blue colors complementary to the newsletter's masthead graphic. And because the 100 percent color is so dark, using percentage prints throughout the interior for text boxes and heading text provides a two-color feel with an economical single-color print.

Next, we modified the front cover shell design to accommodate the overprinting. We had to ensure that the text could be read where it overprinted the four-color areas of the shells. This meant the overprint areas needed to be white or light-colored and free of other graphics. The old design used a black box underneath the masthead banner graphic for the date and volume information. We deleted this and moved the date and volume information into a light area of the banner background. The old black box was replaced by a gold bar divider.

We also had to change the contents area on the left side of the front cover. This area uses section icons with accompanying page numbers to direct readers to the different regular newsletter sections. For readability, we reduced the print ink in the background of this area to 10 percent; the overprinted text is displayed at 100 percent. To ensure a cleaner overprint, we moved the page numbers to the right of each section icon and increased the size of the contents area to allow room for the page numbers.

Then came the difficult part! For the section icons to be printed in four-color as part of the cover shells we ordered in bulk, we had to standardize the sections so they would be the same from issue to issue (which hadn't been done before). After much discussion, we decided on the following regular sections:

• President's Corner
• Chapter News
• Tools, Technology, & Techniques
• Professional Development
• Colorado Connections
• Volunteer Spotlight