For years I’ve heard that, even if you have a blog, nothing can match a regularly published newsletter for connecting with people and letting them know what’s going on with you and your work. And with my annual family reunion fast approaching, I began thinking about how much I sucked for not writing Christmas letters, replying to correspondence, or sending out pictures and updates about April and me. When these two thoughts came together, I decided to start writing my own newsletter.
Since I hadn’t written a newsletter before, the entire process was quite the learning experience for me. I learned a lot about designing the letter by using a pre-built template in Pages ’09, and now feel confident that I can design the next one myself. I also discovered that the content has to come first–when I began with the design, I started writing to fit what I saw on the page and it prevented me from saying everything I wanted to say. In this particular case, the design has to be made to fit the content. Once everything’s in place, I may have to cut a line or a paragraph, but the end result will be a lot better than writing to fill space.
