About Antiphon

Every week, in tens of thousands of parishes, somebody sits down to make the bulletin. It is rarely their main job. It is often done in a word processor, on a template inherited from whoever did it before, against a deadline that arrives every seven days without fail.

The result is the most widely read document the parish produces. More people hold the bulletin than visit the website. It goes home, it sits on kitchen tables, it gets read by people who did not hear the announcements. It deserves to be set properly.

The liturgical year is not a theme

Most design tools would have you pick a colour. A parish bulletin already has one, and it changes through the year: violet through Advent and Lent, white and gold at Christmas and Easter, red at Pentecost and for the martyrs, green through Ordinary Time.

Antiphon reads the vestment colour from the liturgical calendar and lets the design follow it. It is not a decorative choice we make on your behalf — it is information you already have, doing work on the page. A template that ignores it is a newsletter template with a cross on it.

Printing paid for by the neighbourhood

Printing costs money, and parish budgets are not elastic. So local businesses buy space on the back page, and their sponsorships cover the printing and the delivery. Signup, design and digital publishing stay free.

Two things about that arrangement matter more than the price. The parish reviews and can veto any advertisement before it is printed — no one else decides what appears alongside your Mass times. And when sponsors spend more than the printing costs, the surplus is shared with the parish.

Set like print, because it is print

This site is set in the same way the bulletins are: warm paper, a serif for reading, rules and ornament instead of shadows and gradients, and one colour used deliberately. That is not nostalgia. It is the plainest way to show what the tool actually produces, before you have made anything with it.