It’s very hard to get noticed – especially if you’re just starting out with a cause you are very passionate about and you have to come out of pocket for expensive newsletter, brochure, and flyer templates. There are tons of amazing resources out there, but as someone who would rather donate money straight to a favorite charity, instead of wasting it on templates, I decided to put together ready-to-use PSD files which can be tweaked for any cause. Please download the PSD (Photoshop) Newsletter Template HERE.

After you open the template, it will look something like this:

What really interests me is human rights, specifically for women and mothers – so when I put this template together I made sure that it reflected a feminine, yet firm layout and visuals. Of course, this may not reflect everyone’s interests, and this is why I listed the instruction below on how you can manipulate it to fit any theme – I am going to use ‘Save The Planet’ as my test subject:

• Open the PSD template. You will find that all of the layers with text are marked with a ‘T’ and labeled in a pretty intuitive way. Double-click on the top layer (right on the ‘T’) – this will highlight the Organization Name in the file and allow me to change it to anything I want. Let’s type in “Save the Planet Newsletter.” Double-click on the second layer from the top, Newsletter Date, and change the date to when your issue will be made available to the public. If you have a logo that you would like to use, you can always skip this part by pasting your logo directly into the template (you can delete the topmost layer altogether in this case).
• I’m not going to fill in different dummy content, because that’s standard as far as templates go, but I think that the color scheme and images are not appropriate for the test subject, which lends itself to green and brown colors. First, let’s change out the header image – scroll down in your Layers palette and find the Header Image located third from the bottom. I thought an image of the rain forest would look great (TIP: you can change the color of the letters from black to any color you wish, just in case your background image is way to dark). Make sure that the image is really good because you are going to use a bigger version of it for the background.
• Use the larger version of your image on the background by toggling the Opacity and Layer Settings in the scroll-down menu as you see in Layer 1 (second from the bottom). I do recommend that you Desaturate it (SHFT + CTR + U) so that there are no color conflicts why you apply Layer Styles.
• Finally, you don’t have to do any more additions to the template – so how do you make the orange parts green or any color you want? – It’s simple. Just click on the layer you want to adjust, like Background or Header/Footer, and go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation (or CTR + U). This will allow you to toggle the existing color settings to any hue. If you don’t like the ‘Flair’, you can delete it (or adjust hue as you see fit)

If you would like to see the final Save the Planet Newsletter Template – CLICK HERE. This is what it looks like: