This, Not That — Simple Swaps for Better Bulletins

Your parish bulletin is important! As one of your church’s main sources of communication with your members, you want it looking top-notch — easy to navigate, approachable for newcomers, packed with evangelizing content, and intentionally designed to be as vibrant and beautiful as your community.

Chances are good that your bulletin editor spends a lot of time carefully creating each weekly publication. With this in mind, we collected some tips from our professional designers here at LPi that can help you easily give your bulletin a fresh new look. After all, we are as invested as you are in the success of your parish communications!

Design

Swap Out — Large columns of text that run across the whole page.

Instead — Utilize a two or three-column format for your bulletin and stick to that throughout. It makes the publication easier to read, especially if it is a text heavy bulletin! You can check out some great examples on our bulletin before and after page.

Swap out — Text box frames, colored lines, and strokes around text.

Instead — Use a light, color-neutral background behind one or two text boxes on the page to separate sections. Highlight a few items by using a vibrant color box if you want something to pop! This creates a sense of order, tailored approach, and a more unified message in your bulletin layout.

Swap out — Using too many fonts and colors.

Instead — Stay consistent with your brand colors, not only with the bulletin, but everything you publish or create as a parish. This makes anything you do instantly recognizable to your community and more appealing to newcomers. Want to try something new? Consider occasionally stepping away from liturgical calendar colors. More often than not, your parish staff will know the liturgical color of the season but if you ask a parishioner, they might not even know that you use it in the bulletin. These colors can work well with special holiday cover designs but, leave the rest of the liturgical colors to those in charge of decorating the parish sanctuary.

As for fonts, find an easy-to-read font and utilize it with regular weight, bold, and italic. It’s fine if you want to use another font family for your headers but stick to that. Don't go inviting more font styles to the party as it can become busy and confusing for your readers. If you are using more than four different fonts, chances are you have some decisions to make about narrowing down your guest list of fonts.

In fact, if your parish doesn’t already have a brand book with pre-chosen fonts, colors, and a logo, we specialize in helping churches create a beautiful brand that can be used across all communications!

Swap out — Your old masthead.
Instead — Update your information and design! We see so many parishes using mastheads on the cover of their bulletin with designs that look like they’re from the 80’s. Utilize your parish fonts and colors and make sure to include any updated pertinent information. Don’t forget to include information about your parish’s social media profiles, website, and Mass times!

Swap out — Outdated logos.

Instead — If your logo is as old as your parish and looks outdated, it might be time for a logo refresh or even a brand-new design! We have created logos for countless parishes that often include elements of the parish’s architecture, a patron saint, a special style of cross, or elements of the parish’s geographic location or name in the design. We have lots of experience and are excited to help get you started if the need arises!

Content

Swap out — Over-packed pages.

Instead — Look to add white space and larger borders between your bulletin’s columns of text and content. Adding more white space helps your reader’s eyes rest and makes the experience of reading your bulletin easier and more enjoyable. Consider what you can remove for a stream-lined reading experience.

Swap out — Stretched images and clipart.
Instead — Choose images that fit the space you want to fill already. Stretching an image to fit a space can cause the image to distort and immediately makes your bulletin design look careless. If you aren’t sure about your graphic design skills, we have thousands of professionally designed images specifically made with church bulletins in mind and ready for you to use in WeCreate — our library of Catholic content. It’s also important to use photography taken of your church and community. Have you seen the Layperson’s Guide to Smartphone Church Photography yet?
 

Swap out — Adding your whole calendar of events to the bulletin.

Instead —  Don’t overload your bulletin with too much content. Choose to highlight specific events and then point to your parish website’s event page for more. If you need help with your website, our web design tool, WeConnect, makes it incredibly easy to share your calendar online. We can even help you get started with the design work if you need.

Don’t get too specific about the events in your bulletin, simply shout the event out with a sentence or two and a great image. Don’t take up space with all of the little details. Instead, use an event landing page on your website for that or add an event flyer as an insert to the bulletin with all of the pertinent information there. 

A few extras —

Did you know that LPi provides all sorts of options for bulletin content every week inside of WeCreate and that, if your parish is already one of our partners in mission, your staff already has access to our entire library of Catholic content for free?

Consider dropping some of the following LPi content into your weekly bulletin:

• Weekly Gospel Illustrations
• Catholic comics like Father Flood
• Saint of the Week biographies and illustrations
• Children’s puzzles and pages
• Beautifully and professionally designed bulletin covers

If you are already a bulletin customer but need help accessing your WeCreate account to make use of the incredible graphics and bulletin content available to you, get into touch with our customer service so that we can get you squared away!

Not printing your parish bulletin with LPi? Learn more about our free print and digital church bulletin service here!

Updated on 03-18-2024