Community Tech Tip — The Livewire 3.0

​by Russ Alman, Communications Director — 

​This month’s Livewire should look almost exactly like last month’s. 
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That is a good thing. 

What you can’t see, however, is the complete rebuild I did to move our newsletter into current design software.

When I became the communications director for Foothills Community Center in 2023, The Livewire had been built based on a template that was designed decades ago in Microsoft Publisher, a page layout application introduced in 1991 and marketed to Windows users for general purpose design. 

Screenshot of Microsoft Publisher 1.0, released in 1991 for Microsoft Windows. The application has been declared “end of life” after 35 years. Courtesy of WinWorld.

Page layout applications are specifically for creating flyers, newsletters, newspapers, brochures, books and other documents that require precise layout of graphics, images and text. They include tools like the ability to wrap text around objects and fine tune how text appears on the page, such as kerning, scaling and tracking.

Most graphic designers in the 1990s used Aldus/Adobe Pagemaker or QuarkXpress, which were professional-grade page layout applications that offered much more precise layout tools and color management tools for press-quality production. 

(Fun fact: my first job in 1987 was working part time for the off-campus housing office at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. I used Pagemaker 1.0 on an original black & white Macintosh computer to design brochures. That was quite the experience!)

QuarkXpress was considered the industry standard for over a decade.

However, in 1999, Adobe released inDesign, a totally new page layout platform. They nicknamed it “Quark Killer” because their intent was to dethrone Quark as the industry standard. While it took about a decade, Adobe ultimately won this war. Even now, inDesign is considered the professional standard for page layout.

However, using their product is not cheap. Now that Adobe has moved entirely to a subscription model, a license to use their full suite of applications (including inDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and others), costs $55-$70 per month or more, depending on the version and the duration of the commitment, and that is for one person to use it. Even though as a nonprofit we receive a discounted rate, it would still cost us $35 per month, per person. Since Jennifer Scott and I both work on the newsletter, we would have to pay $70 per month (plus tax). And since it’s a subscription, we would have to keep paying it indefinitely if we wanted to have access to our design files.

Because The Livewire was long overdue for a design overhaul, I rebuilt the template from scratch during the summer of 2024. While I had quite a bit of experience working with inDesign, I decided to rebuild the newsletter in Publisher since the license was included in our nonprofit Microsoft 365 subscriptions that we receive at minimal cost. While dated, the most recent version of Publisher has most of the tools to design a newspaper and export the print file for production at the World Press.

Unfortunately, last fall, Microsoft announced that they had declared Publisher “end of life,” meaning they were no longer going to update it. This was understandable: the application is 35 years old and desktop publishing is outside of Microsoft’s market focus. However, they are not just ending development — they are literally shutting it down. As of October 2026, Publisher will not even open, meaning that we will no longer be able to create new documents or open previous ones we made.

Since I didn’t want to commit us to inDesign subscriptions, I started researching other options and discovered that Canva (the online graphic design application for non-designers) had purchased a company named Serif and made their application, Affinity Studio, free for everyone to use.

I like free…

And since we already have free, nonprofit access to Canva for our organization, we also have the advantage of additional tools, including Canva integration.

Example of the Affinity page layout interface as shown on the website, affinity.studio. Canva acquired Affinity (and its parent company, Serif) in 2024 and susequently made the application free to use, with additional features for Canva subscribers.

So last fall, I made the decision to rebuild our template again using Affinity. This July, I took an extra week of focused design time to make the conversion.

In addition to tools that are comparable (and strikingly similar) to inDesign, Affinity is an all-in-one platform with modes for page layout, photo editing and retouching and vector design, so it is a full replacement for Adobe inDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator.

Did I mention it’s free?

The transition has gone smoothly. Since I have many years of experience with inDesign, the user interface has been relatively easy for me to learn, and any questions I’ve had have been easy to answer with Google Gemini prompts. It’s a bit more of a challenge for Jennifer since she doesn’t have the inDesign background, but she’s quickly adapting to the change. And now we have future-proofed our design work for the foreseeable future.

When I rebuilt the newsletter in Affinity, I paid special attention to creating styles for all components of the template. Almost every section of text now is based on specific fonts, spacing and margins. This helps keep everything uniform and easy to edit. Even the individual elements that make up the calendar are based on styles. The end result is that you should see better consistency throughout the newsletter, and it should be easier for us to update each month.

At the same time, I’ve kept the same overall design, color theme and fonts that we’ve been using for the past two years, so you should see only minor differences that I purposely made to improve on the Publisher template.

I do have an ask for you: Since this is a complete rebuild, there are likely some extra Easter eggs that we’ve overlooked. As you’re reading through this edition, if you see anything that looks odd, is misspelled or is inconsistent, please email me at [email protected] and let me know what you found. I expect it’s going to take a couple of months to squash all the design bugs. I welcome your help!
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And by the way, I’d like to give special shout-out to Linda Barta, who helps us proof every edition of The Livewire. For those of you who haven’t met her, Linda used to be the staff historian for the Wenatchee World and has many years of professional proofing experience. Her assistance every month is a godsend.