What this template is

A printed customer newspaper does something a mailing list cannot: it sits on a counter and gets picked up by somebody who never subscribed to anything. The layout reflects that. A modest lead, an at a glance box carrying the practical details, a photograph, and then a grid of short items, because a customer paper is read in pieces rather than read through.

The inside page is a longer piece and a section of notes, with a pull quote. The longer piece is where a case study or a supplier story goes; the notes are for dates, closures, and anything a customer needs to act on.

How to fill it in

The rule that makes these work is that every item is about a person or a thing, never about the company in the abstract. We are committed to quality is unreadable. Anna has been making these for nine years and here is how is read to the end.

Fill the at a glance box with the five things a stranger needs: what you do, where you are, when you are open, how to order and who to ask. It is the most useful part of the page and it takes five minutes.

If you use a customer's story, get their permission in writing and use their real name. An anonymised case study reads as fiction, which is worse than not running it.

What usually goes wrong

The failure mode is a brochure. If every item is an offer, people stop picking it up, and the whole advantage over an email disappears. A reasonable ratio is one selling item in five.

The second is corporate photography. A stock photograph of a handshake reproduces badly on newsprint and reads as filler. Photographs of your own staff and premises reproduce better and are the reason anybody reads a company paper.

The third is print quantity. Order for one distribution cycle, not for the year: prices and staff change, and a pallet of last year's paper is a liability.

Opening and editing the files

The PDF holds both pages and is the one to look at first. It is drawn at the exact document size for the format you chose, so printing it at a hundred percent gives you a true proof of the layout. Use it to check the design before you commit to editing anything.

The two SVGs are the editable version. Every headline, caption and paragraph is real text rather than an outline, so you can click into it and type. They open in Inkscape, which is free, and in Illustrator, Affinity Designer and Figma. The photograph placeholders are plain rectangles; delete one and put your own picture in its place, keeping to the same box so the text around it does not have to move.

The template is set in the standard PDF serif and sans faces, which is deliberate: they are the faces that exist everywhere, so the file looks the same on your machine as it does on ours and on the printer's. If you would rather use something else, the guide to newsprint fonts covers what survives at small sizes on absorbent paper, which is a narrower field than it looks.

Before you order

Check the page count rule for the format you have chosen. Most of the printers here work in multiples of four, one works in multiples of eight, and one publishes no rule at all. The margin and safe area calculator will check a page count against a format, and the format's own specification page carries the full rules on colour, resolution and export settings.

Check your photographs at the size you are actually printing them rather than at the size they look on screen. The image DPI checker gives you the effective resolution and tells you the largest a picture can safely go. Newsprint is absorbent and loses fine detail, so a photograph that is marginal on screen will be worse on paper.

Then export a proof PDF and run it through your printer's own preflight before you pay for anything. Every figure in this template came from that printer's published guidelines on the date shown below, but presses vary and guidelines get revised.

About the photographs

The pictures in these templates are placeholders and you are meant to replace them. They are here because a template with an empty grey box does not show you what your paper will look like, and because a page with a photograph on it is laid out differently from one without.

Every one is public domain or CC0, taken from Wikimedia Commons, and the build refuses any image whose licence asks for attribution. That rule exists for your sake rather than ours: an attribution requirement cannot survive somebody opening the file, deleting a caption and sending it to a press. So if you print these pages exactly as they are, including commercially, you owe nobody anything. The sources are listed anyway, because you should be able to check rather than take our word for it.

Figures on this page come from Newspaper Club artwork guidelines, read on 2026-08-20. Presses vary and printers revise their guidelines, so run a test PDF through their own preflight before you order.