From November, 2018 till the beginning of 2024, I did the weekly newsletter for Golf Manor Synagogue (“GMS”). The design took its cues from the existing newsletter, as well as the typography in its long-standing logo. I added a simple drawing of the stained-glass ner tamid from the synagogue’s main sanctuary as a structural element. Here are an image of the Bulletin’s previous design and three examples of the redesigned newsletter.
CHDS Report Cards, circa 2012 (click to view a PDF of all four)
Once upon a time, our children’s day school had volunteer curriculum committees, comprised of teachers and parents. In 2011 or 2012, I was invited to join the General Studies Committee. Among other things, I was tasked with overhauling the school’s report card forms for grades 1-8, both General (secular) and Judaic.
My wife and I had long agonized over the school’s report cards – click on the thumbnails to see them for yourself – especially those for the “Upper Level” Grades. Our biggest gripe was that there was never enough room for teachers’ comments, and once the children were in grades with multiple, specialist teachers, there was barely enough comment room for even the first quarter.
The Committee also found other weaknesses in the forms. Among them:
As it turned out, the school was about to implement a change from quarters to trimesters, so we had the perfect excuse to overhaul the report cards. The new forms would:
The iconography was relatively easy. I created large icons, with which to identify a given report card as covering general or Judaic subjects. These were simple, square, black-and-white shapes, which would reproduce nicely on a photocopier.
I also came up with a system for identifying which grade (first through eighth) and which class (boys, girls, or coed) a given report card covered. (Judaic Studies classes at that time were coed for the primary grades, and gender-separated for the older grades; General Studies classes were coed through eighth grade. Later, as the school grew, all grades and classes were separated by gender.)
The icons panel
All of these icons were arranged in the upper right-hand corner of the form.
I also incorporated the school’s branding – logo and logotype – in the design.
The behavioral report took up a lot of space, so it was moved to its own page, the back of the printed report card. Once it had been laid out, it was easy to deploy throughout the school – the checklist was the same for all eight grades, so all I had to do was provide more or fewer columns for each class’ respective number of teachers.
But as I worked on the layout, I struggled with one challenge in particular: Traditional report cards are actually simple tables. They allow you to see an entire year’s grades for a given subject side-by-side, which makes it easy to track progress from term to term. Also, they often stack all of a given term’s grades in a column, which makes it easy to get a quick snapshot of a student’s overall performance in a given term. How could I make ample room for comments and other information without interfering with that kind of basic functionality?
A study in compromise – click to enlarge
In the end, the design reflected compromises between our project’s goals and the need to hold on to the simple functionality of a table, and I had to tailor those compromises to suit the teaching structures of different grades. Take the report card pictured here, for example. Five subjects are taught by one homeroom teacher, who gets one set of attendance and comment fields for each term – and those fields are positioned to the right of the grading areas for the homeroom subjects. Four other subjects are taught by specialist teachers; there’s room for attendance and comments next to each term’s grades. In theory, I could have presented the homeroom subjects’ grades in a traditional, easy-to-follow grid; in fact, doing so would probably have taken up less space. However, I decided it would simplify the form overall if the grades and terms were arranged vertically – consistant with the arrangement of the specialists’ grades.
We rolled out the new report cards in the fall of 2012. Here they are, in four PDF’s.
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This seemed like something other schools could adopt, and I eventually posted my work on Torah Umesorah‘s teacher resource web site. I know of at least one school which has expressed an interest in modifying these report cards for their own use.
You can license a customized version of this calendar for your local mikveh! To learn more, please contact me at the e-mail address from the back cover of the calendar. You can also find contact info on my resume.
(Click on any image to view a PDF of that year’s calendar.)
The inspiration: a mikveh calendar from Chicago
In 2002, the women at what was then the Beth Tvillah Mikveh Society approached me about making them a personal calendar, with daily sunrise and sunset times and general information about the laws of family purity. They suggested modeling it on a calendar put out by a similar organization in Chicago.
This was a fun challenge to take on. The calendar would have to include both Jewish and secular dates, while presenting the notion that the two don’t completely overlap – Jewish calendar dates begin and end at sundown, not midnight. We also decided to add holiday information and sunrise times (which were not in Chicago’s calendar), while preserving “white” space, in which users could add notes.
The new Mikveh Calendar (5763)
My solution was to print the calendar on larger stock – half of a legal (8.5 x 14 inches) sheet, instead of Chicago’s letterhalf; the finished calendar would be seven inches wide, instead of 5.5. Chaiah Schwab provided the cover art. I made the vertical margins between days narrower than the horizontal margins between weeks; I felt this better conveyed the left-to-right flow of time, from day to day, within each week. A list of sunrise and sunset times was placed to the right of each week, in the space provided by the larger paper. I wrote a short, illustrated guide to using the calendar, and I lightly edited the rest of the text, which the ladies had provided.
5765 calendar, with chart
The women liked the calendar a lot, but some of them wanted more space for notes. I ended up replacing the last page of successive calendars with a simple chart, like one Rabbi Chaim Papelow (of Yeshivat Mikdash Melech, in Brooklyn) had once told me to make. Removing one month wasn’t as problematic as it would sound – each calendar included the first two or three months of the following year. I also experimented a bit with the page breaks in the instructional section.
The revamped 5766 calendar
In 2005, after migrating from PageMaker (the page-layout software I’d been using) on a PC to InDesign on a Mac, I completely revamped the layout, giving it an airier, friendlier, retro-modern look. At the same time, the calendar now packed much more information, something users had asked for. Sunset and sunrise times were moved into each day’s space, where they would be easier to find. The numbers for each date were arranged to reflect the order in which they began, from left to right – the Hebrew, Jewish numbers were placed in the “night time” half of each date, and the English, secular numbers were placed to the right. Religious holiday info was enhanced and expanded, and secular calendar events were added. The space where the time charts had once been was moved to the left-hand margin and laid out for organized note-taking. I redesigned the cover, using a photograph of the vintage Formica in my mother’s bathroom. The rounded rectangle shape became a visual motif that carried throughout the entire calendar. (It’s supposed to look like a vintage TV screen – and the top and bottom are not symmetrical!)
5770 – a two-year calendar
Four years later, change was afoot. A new mikveh was under construction, in a safer, more central location. The Mikveh Society itself was undergoing some organizational shifts. I redesigned the calendar’s cover to reflect those changes. The last page of the calendar was requisitioned for information about both the mivkeh and the organization. The chart was moved to the spread just before the first calendar page. At the request of some of the women, I added a panel just beneath the chart, in which I explained the Hebrew representation of Jewish dates. The calendar also moved to a two-year (27 month) format. Although each copy would cost more to print, the expense over a two-year period would be less. Also, I would only have to update the calendar every other year.
The 5776-5777 calendar
By the next time I updated the calendar, the new location had opened, and Beth Tvillah Mikveh Society had become the Cincinnati Community Mikveh. I replaced the branding on the outside of the calendar, and I added more specific location info to the back-page information section, including separate QR codes for directions to the men’s and women’s parking and entrances.
Over the course of nineteen years, I produced eleven annual reports for the Cincinnati Community Kollel – annual in the sense that each covered a year’s activities. Over time, they evolved and grew, reflecting different periods in the Kollel’s development. I’ll include all of the reports here, for the amusement of any Kollel alumni and friends who happen to find this page.
The first three reports were very similar, and relatively simple. They were produced in-house (printed and saddle-stitched), on letter-sized paper. Although some of the photos in the PDF’s are in color, these reports were actually printed in black and white. The Kollel made a point of including financial information, provided by a volunteer bookkeeper. (Donors immediately appreciated the organization’s transparency, even if they didn’t know how to interpret financial statements, and they still do.) For these first three reports I didn’t bother prettying the financials up; I just scanned them and pasted the images into the reports. We also included a comprehensive list of everyone who had ever made a contribution; the Kollel made a point of recognizing even relatively small donations, in contrast with the norm among big-city and East Coast organizations – an attitude of which I’m still proud.
Click on an image to view that annual report as a PDF.
After a year’s hiatus, we did two more reports. I refreshed the visuals, and typeset the financials to match the reports’ look and feel. There were also produced in-house.
Click on an image to view that annual report as a PDF.
In 2007, the Kollel expanded into a second building and opened up a satellite location in the northern exurbs. We didn’t put out an annual report until the following spring, but when we did it reflected that expansion, moving from letter-sized (11″) paper to legal (14″). The layout was completely revamped, there were more photos (including some taken by me). We printed the cover, the centerfold, and the financials in color – on the Kollel’s first color laser printer. The following year’s report was done the same way, with the addition of a simulated group photo, featuring then-current staff and local alumni and their families.
A few years went by before we did another report. By then, the Kollel’s northern outpost had closed, but the Kollel had started a community-building project, hiring a part-time community evangelist of sorts. The 2014 report was totally redesigned and much more colorful, although it was still printed and bound in-house. A lot of emphasis was placed on people the Kollel had brought to Cincinnati; that included hiring a photographer to take portraits of the staff and their families. The content was organized into distinctive sections, each with its own visual cues. This was such a large undertaking that the following year we followed it up with a simpler, trifold brochure – printed in color on 14″ paper, with a front panel that bore a strong similarity to the 2014 report.
In 2016, the Kollel practically doubled in size. This was partly funded by a 24-hour online fundraising campaign, and the list of donors grew so long that for the first time we had to limit it to the current year’s honor roll – which still included anyone who had contributed at least $25 over the course of the year. The format of the report borrowed heavily from the materials I’d produced for that years’s annual event. This report was printed at a traditional print house (Springdot) and it featured a full bleed – what a luxury! The centerfold featured a composite photo of the enlarged Kollel “family.”
The next year, we weren’t able to produce an annual report until the final week of the calendar year, when printers were closed for the holidays – so we had to print and bind it in-house once more. No bleeds. The visuals from the most recent fundraising materials didn’t lend themselves well to an annual report, so instead I borrowed a bit from the Kollel’s parasha sheet – including the head shots for the staff lineup, which moved to the inside back cover.
This is a manual I produced for the Chevra Kadisha (literally, “Sacred Society,” a volunteer group which prepares the deceased for burial) of Cincinnati. The previous manual had no illustrations, and some of the Chevra’s procedures had changed when the local funeral home moved into a new facility. I also seem to remember that there were inaccuracies in the previous guidebook, in regard to certain customs and prayers – but I no longer have a copy of the old guidebook, so I can’t verify that. At any rate, the new book was produced with the imprimatur of the late Rabbi Zelig Sharfstein, who headed the local rabbinate, after consultation with Rabbi Elchonon Zohn, a well-known authority and president of the National Association of Chevra Kadisha. 
I was a participating member of the Chevra, and I had attended some of their training sessions with Rabbi Zohn, so I appreciated the need for the revisions, and I had first-hand knowledge of the procedures which needed illustrating.
Looking now at the page with the contents and credits, I see that only took credit for the typesetting. I guess I was feeling modest at the time. I still have my photographs and sketches, on which I based the diagrams, as well as the Photoshop and Illustrator files.
The printed guidebook was produced on legal (8.5 x 11) paper and saddle-stitched; I modified the layout for the PDF posted here.
Years ago, a friend and former coworker started agitating for a locally produced parasha sheet – a weekly, one- or two-page publication with insights into the weekly Torah reading and religious holidays. The Kollel wasn’t ready to take the project on, so he arranged for a local synagogue to distribute it. I was already producing the synagogue’s newsletter, and I ended up also doing “CZE Torah,” as it was called, in my “spare” time – which was barely enough for me to scan the material for glaring typos.
At the beginning of 2013, the parasha sheet finally became a Kollel project. It was renamed Cincinnati Torah, aka Torah miCincy (a Hebrew pun). The weekly was also given an additional raison d’être: coverage of the Kollel’s activities and programming. The quality of the layout improved, and I started editing the content in earnest. I was able to make more contributions as a writer now, which I enjoyed, but the tradeoff was that I also ended up becoming the guy who had to ask other people to write pieces for the sheet.
In 2016, the Kollel expanded both its staff and its programming. The parasha sheet got a minor facelift, and Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Crystal took over as what I call “Contributing Managing Editor,” overseeing the creation of more varied content and soliciting contributions (written contributions, that is; another staff member took charge of finding sponsors). I continued in my role as “Contributing Production Editor,” doing the design and layout, editing the content, and writing the occasional piece, until April, 2018, shortly after I left my post at the Kollel .
There’s an archive of several years’ worth of parasha sheets at cincykollel.org, but here are several issues from the most recent iteration of the parasha sheet, including three for which I did some of the writing.
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Here are three earlier issues with content I wrote.
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And, finally, here are some badges I created, to identify special or seasonal content that spanned a series of issues.
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From May, 2009, to April, 2017, I produced the weekly newsletter for Congregation Zichron Eliezer (“CZE,” the synagogue formerly known as Kneseth Israel, or “KI”). It was a labor of love – a weekly exercise in copy-fitting, copy-editing (I often joked that condensing everyone’s announcements to fit on the page was good training for a career on Twitter) and information presentation.
Here are four examples which show how the layout evolved over time. My primary goals were to make the most of the space on the page, and to make it easy for the reader to find the information he/she needed. The masthead and the schedule moved around a bit. The sponsorship panel and the section headings became more streamlined and clean. Classes which repeated every week, with little variation, were removed from the “Torah” announcement space and placed in their own sidebar. I added a 36-hour weather forecast to the footer. Weekly features, like the “Kovaya Makom” announcement, were added (and, in some cases, removed). At some point, the newsletter also expanded to two pages (one sheet, front and back).
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Here are some more sample issues, with special features, all from the last year I worked on the newsletter.
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And here are some holiday editions, with extended schedules and seasonal themes. The four Purim Editions were supplements to the regular newsletter. As you an see, the usual rules didn’t apply on Purim; I only wish I’d had some sulfated castor oil to sprinkle on the faux mimeographs, so they’d smell like the real thing!
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