Questions to Keep in Mind

1. As you develop your PACT notes, ask yourself what characteristics you would use to describe your audience and their interests. Why do they shop at a farmers’ market? What do they want to get out of it? How would they describe themselves?
2. What stories and images seem to be most important?
3. If you can have an important story fill the whole front page, should you? Or should you have multiple stories start on the first page but then ask readers to jump to a new page to finish each story?
4. How large should you make the masthead on the main page?
5. How can you apply design principles such as hierarchy and white space to make the newsletter easy to read? Will color in specific elements (or categories of elements) be useful?
6. How much time do you think your audience is willing to put into reading a text? How long should the various articles be?
7. What secondary graphic elements are included on more professional-looking newsletters? “Rules” (thin lines underscoring or separating content)? Pull quotes (quotations taken from an article and duplicated in larger text in a box to catch a reader’s attention)?
8. What image should a farmers’ market project? What separates a farmers’ market from a small-town grocery store? Or a huge but well-stocked chain store? How can you reflect that image in the newsletter?
9. Will you need to revise the structure of some of the articles to make them more focused? Which articles seem to call out for a narrative or story structure (building suspense or entertainment), and which need more direct, information structures (with the main points at the very start and details at the end)?
10. How can you edit the images to make them stronger? More interesting? Can they be cropped to focus in on key elements related to your purpose?