In my time in newsletter printing and design, I have actually always relied on a lot of amazing and very useful free aids or resources. I will now share with you five of my most favorite free resources that I have used in most of my newsletter printing. Just read on and discover these five amazing aids for your newsletter printing and design. Trust me, all of these are free and well worth your time in investigating.

1. Free publishing software: Open Office – OpenOffice.org has been a boom to people who want to save money on office software. Simply put, Open Office is basically open source software that can be downloaded for free. It is similar to Microsoft Office, though there are some different user interface items that you will have to get used to.

The great thing about this is that you can create a simple newsletter document using its Writer application which is similar to MS Word. You can create columns, insert images, add banners, do text boxes etc. etc. It does everything you need to do for newsletter printing, and it is all for free. So you should definitely try this out.

2. Free Picture Editors: GIMP, Inkscape – Now, another free aid for newsletter design that you should be aware of are those free picture or graphics editors. GIMP and Inkscape are just a few great examples of this. They basically help you enhance photographs just like Adobe Photoshop, and even create your own graphics just like Illustrator. So if you need to create your own custom clip-arts, shapes, arrows etc, you can easily do it using these free software. You never even have to spend one cent on them which is really great.

3. Free newsletter samples and templates – Now, a big help for most newsletter designers are templates. Newsletter templates take a lot of the work out of the act of designing those prints. With pre-formatted and pre-set templates, all you really have to do is to type in your content and insert your graphics to complete your newsletters.

Luckily for us, newsletter templates can be downloaded for free online. Look for online newsletter printing companies and they will be happy to provide you with theirs at no cost really. So if you need some help with designing newsletters, you should just download those free templates, there is little risk really in using them.

4. Free newsletter graphics – If you do not want to create your own graphics and instead want to acquire them for free, you can also actually do that for your color newsletters. Free newsletter graphics can easily be acquired by visiting free image galleries in flickr.com and Open Photo.com. These sites offer free image collections that have the creative commons license.

In this license you can get the images for free as long as there is some sort of attribution added into them. This should be great for some of your newsletter articles wherein a certain picture is needed but you did not have the chance to get it on your own.

5. Free newsletter fonts – Lastly, since color newsletters are about lots of informative text, a great aid that will help you improve it are free newsletter fonts. Luckily for all of use free fonts are abound online. A simple Google search will net you hundreds of sites that have font collections that you can download for free. Just pick the right one for your newsletters and install them in your machine. It is that easy and you’ll get nice looking fonts for your newsletters with little effort at all.

Great! As you can see, it is pretty amazing what free aids you can get today for newsletter printing. Use all of these to help you make your custom newsletters better and more cost effective.