Note: For those of you more seasoned designers out there, you might have chosen to read this article out of pure curiosity or maybe because you were hoping to find enough fodder to start a debate. This article isn’t aimed at you, instead, my hope is to provide some useful information for those just starting out in design. My goal is to make each and every person who publishes or seeks to publish content become a better designer. If this happens, we all win.
In today’s world, self-publishing is everywhere. Every one of us has a multitude of opportunities to write and publish our own content. We write blogs, articles, books and manuscripts, not to mention brochures, signs, websites, and menus just to scratch the surface.
When we create this content, we are eventually faced with the problem of creating the best design to deliver the content to its audience. This is typically the role for a graphic designer. Perhaps though you don’t consider yourself a graphic designer or you are just starting out. If thats the case, there are a few simple rules that anyone can follow to make any content better designed, even without specialty training.
1. Don’t Try to Get Fancy
This is probably among the most difficult and surprising things for people to know. Design is in the details, not in the flash. The easiest way to spot an amateur is over-embellishment. Do your best to avoid any of the temptation to add a decorative border, clip-art, and even color, at least lots of color.
Restriction is key. The only way to create a single focal point, (to point out the most important thing on any one item) is to set it apart. If there are too many things happening, it can easily overwhelm your reader and at the very least, it makes it difficult for them to know what to look at first. You need to choose what is most important, and then employ one or two subtle methods to set that thing apart from the rest. I’d recommend making the most important thing bigger (not huge, just noticeably larger) and bolder than the other material.
Think about reading a text book. You can quickly scan a page to find what you are looking for because certain things are set apart from the bulk of the content. You look at any available headings, images, and captions to determine if the information you are looking for is on any particular page. Now imagine if the person who designed that book had gone out of their way to decorate more. Though at first glance you might think, wow that is fun, but it wouldn’t add to your ability to find anything. Instead it would just make the book more difficult to use because all that decoration is now distracting you from the content. This is the opposite of your goal which is to make whatever material you are creating easy to use and understand.
2. Set Generous Margins & Spacing
Have you ever experienced the phenomenon where you are reading and you find yourself accidentally reading and re-reading the same line over and over? This usually happens because the line of text is too long for your eyes and your brain to easily decipher. The best way to combat this is to shorten the length of each line. Designers have some very specific formulas and techniques for dealing with individual situations, but generally speaking, your brain can easily read a continuous string of up to 15 words. After that, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep your place.
Other factors that hurt reading are when lines get too close together or start and end too close to the edge of the page. There is a strange tension that your brain experiences when certain things get too close to other things and it causes some weird hiccups. Luckily, just about any word processing program allows you to pretty easily set page margins and spacing.
At the very least ensure that you have a full inch around all four sides of any document, though it’s best to count your average words per line and increase the margins to get closer to your 15 word of less per line goal. If the margins get too ridiculously large, you can always increase your type size. For print documents 12pt is about as big as you want to go for paragraphs, but for online documents, you can feel comfortable at 14pt.
Once you’ve adjusted your margins and your type size, make sure to also adjust your line spacing. The best bet here is probably 1.5 (one and half). Double spacing leaves too much room and your eyes can wander and single spacing creates that tension I mentioned above.
3. Just Use Arial
Choosing fonts is one of the most difficult things for a designer to do when working on a project. Many will spend a ton of time studying tons of different, but very similar typefaces looking for the tiniest details that make it more or less appropriate for the project. It’s very deeply engrained in trained designers that the typeface (most of your will use the word font) is the voice of the text. This means that like people, they have certain personalities, traits, and subtle nuances that make up who they are and what they are good at. Choosing the wrong one for the wrong job causes problems that people maybe don’t even know they are having (similar to the re-reading a line of text).
Developing the ability to see these things takes a whole lot of practice. Most people might think that 99% of the fonts the see in the wild, especially for paragraph text are boring, but those people maybe haven’t ever tried to read a paragraph set in a totally inappropriate typeface. The goal is to make reading and comprehension easy, while also providing context to the material, not to entertain. I bet most of you have sat through an over designed powerpoint full of color, fonts, background images, and animated transitions. These things are so distracting that they work against the material being presented. The way I see it, the material needs to be what’s interesting. If it’s not, then no amount of dancing squirrels are going to help your reader digest your material.
When choosing a font for your work, especially if your work contains a lot of reading (like an article or book), choose an old standby. There is a reason that every computer on the planet has a few common fonts, it’s because these work. They may not be the absolute best choice, but they are all an OK choice. Here’s my shortlist of some very commonly available fonts: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Times New Roman, and Georgia. These guys have been carefully designed and battle tested. Don’t be afraid to use the same font for the whole document. Use subtle sizing changes, italics, and bolding (see rule #1) to set apart headings and captions.
Resist the urge to use fanciful typefaces, even for titles and headings. Most are very distracting and won’t help your reader understand your material. It’s difficult, I know, but resist the urge to entertain with fonts and colors. Try to focus on making the communication as clear and easy to read as possible. I mentioned earlier that there are a set of fonts that show up on almost all computers. I realize that there are other very common ones, but unfortunately most of those are not great choices, though tempting as they are, please stay away from: Papyrus, Markerfelt, Hobo, Curlz, Comic Sans, and any script (handwriting) font. These guys all had their time and place, and might still in a rare occasion, but are now tired and overused. Avoid them and you’ll be just fine.
The Takeaway
Design, as they say, is “in the details”. When attempting to turn content into something with a bit more style, remember the details mentioned above. As tempting as it is to just keep adding items, sometimes, beginning with a restrained set of rules lets your most important resource - your content - do the talking rather than hiding it behind several layers of makeup.