Producing Your Message

Now it’s time to put your hard work on display. The production quality of your message—the total effect of page or screen design, graphical elements, typography, and so on—plays an important role in its effectiveness. A polished, inviting design not only makes your document easier to read but also conveys a sense of professionalism and importance.6

Designing for Readability

Design affects readability in two important ways. First, depending on how they are used, design elements can increase or decrease the effectiveness of your message. Thoughtful, reader-focused design makes messages easier to read, whereas poorly chosen design elements can act as barriers that impede communication. Second, the visual design sends a nonverbal message to your readers, influencing their perceptions of the communication before they read a single word (see Figure 5.3 on the next page).

To achieve an effective design, pay careful attention to the following design elements:

■Consistency. Throughout each message, be consistent in your use of margins, typeface, type size, spacing, color, lines, and position. In most cases, you’ll want to be consistent from message to message as well; that way, audiences who receive multiple messages from you recognize your documents and know what to expect. Style sheets and themes can be a big help here.

■Balance. Balance is an important but sometimes subjective design issue. One document may have a formal, rigid design in which the various elements are placed in a grid pattern, whereas another may have a less formal design in which elements flow more freely across the page—and both could be in balance. Like the tone of your language, visual balance can be too formal, just right, or too informal for a given message.

■Restraint. Strive for simplicity. Don’t clutter your message with too many design elements, too many colors, or too many decorative touches.

■Detail. Pay attention to details that affect your design and thus your message. For instance, extremely wide columns of text can be difficult to read; in many cases a better solution is to split the text into two narrower columns.

Even without special training in graphic design, you can make your printed and electronic messages more effective by understanding the use of some key design elements: white space, margins and line justification, typefaces, and type styles.

White Space

Any space free of text or artwork is considered white space. (Note that “white space” isn’t necessarily white.) These unused areas provide visual contrast and important resting points for your readers. White space includes the open area surrounding headings, margins, paragraph indents, space around images, vertical space between columns, and horizontal space between paragraphs or lines of text. To increase the chance that readers will read your messages, be generous with white space; it makes pages and screens feel less intimidating and easier to read.7

Margins and Justification

5 LEARNING OBJECTIVE

List four principles of effective design, and explain the role of major design elements in document readability.

The quality of your document design, both on paper and on screen, affects readability and audience perceptions.

For effective design, pay attention to

■Consistency

■Balance

■Restraint

■Detail

White space separates elements in a document and helps guide the reader’s eye.

Margins define the space around text and between text columns. In addition to their width, the look and feel of margins are influenced by the way you arrange lines of text, which can be set (1) justified (which means they are flush, or aligned vertically, on both the left and the

Most business documents use a flush left margin and a ragged right margin.

Typefaces

Typeface refers to the physical design of letters, numbers, and other text characters. (Font and typeface are often used interchangeably, although strictly speaking, a font is a set of characters in a given typeface.) Typeface influences the tone of your message, making it look authoritative or friendly, businesslike or casual, classic or modern, and so on (see Table 5.3). Be sure to choose fonts that are appropriate for your message; many of the fonts on your computer are not appropriate for business use.

Serif typefaces have small crosslines (called serifs) at the ends of each letter stroke. Serif faces such as Times New Roman are commonly used for body text, but they can look busy when set in large sizes for headings or other display treatments. Sans serif typefaces, in contrast, lack these serifs. The visual simplicity of sans serif typefaces such as Helvetica and Arial makes them ideal for the larger sizes used in headlines. Sans serif faces can be difficult to read in long blocks of text, however, unless they are formatted with generous amounts of leading (pronounced ledding), or spacing between lines. Many contemporary documents and webpages now use sans serif for body text.

For most documents, you shouldn’t need more than two typefaces, although if you want to make captions or other

text elements stand out, you can use another font.8 If in doubt, you can’t go too wrong with a sans serif typeface (such as Arial) for heads and subheads and a serif typeface (such as Times New Roman) for text and captions. Using more typefaces can clutter a document and produce an amateurish look.

Type Styles

Type style refers to any modification that lends contrast or emphasis to type, including boldface, italic, underlining, and color. For example, you can boldface individual words or phrases to draw more attention to them. Italic type has specific uses as well, such as highlighting quotations and indicating foreign words, irony, humor, book and movie titles, and unconventional usage. Use any type style in moderation. For instance, underlining or using all-uppercase letters can interfere with the reader’s ability to recognize the shapes of words, improperly placed boldface or italicized type can slow down your reader, and shadowed or outlined type can seriously hinder legibility.

The classic style of document design uses a sans serif typeface for headings and a serif typeface for regular paragraph text; however, many contemporary documents and webpages now use all sans serif.

Avoid using any type style that inhibits your audience’s ability to read your messages.

Multimedia elements can convey large amounts of information quickly, engage audiences, express emotions, and support personalization.

Multimedia documents can be powerful communication vehicles, but they require more time, tools, and skills to create.

Designing Multimedia Documents

A multimedia document contains a combination of text, graphics, photographs, audio, animation, video, and interactivity (such as hyperlinks that access webpages or software programs). The document can be a portable, standalone file or

part of a website. Most electronic media now support multiple media formats, so you have a variety of options for creating multimedia documents. For example, you can add photos to a word processor file, audio commentary to a PDF, video clips to a blog posting, and animation to webpages.

As rich media (see page 64), multimedia documents can convey large amounts of information quickly, engage people in multiple ways, express emotions, and allow recipients to personalize the communication process to meet their own needs. However, these documents are more difficult to create than documents that contain only text and static images. To design and create multimedia documents, you need to consider the following factors:

■Creative and technical skills. Depending on what you need to accomplish, creating and integrating multimedia elements can require some creative and technical skills. Fortunately, many basic tasks, such as adding photographs or video clips to a webpage, have gotten much easier in recent years. And with the right software, creating animations, videos, and screencasts is within the reach of most business communicators.

■Tools. The hardware and software tools needed to create and integrate media elements are now widely available and generally affordable. For example, with simpler and less expensive consumer versions of professional photo and video editing software, or even the many free tools available online, you can often perform all the tasks you need for routine business media.

■Time and cost. Creating multimedia documents is easier than ever, but you still need to consider time and cost—and exercise good judgment when deciding whether to include multimedia and how much to include. Make sure the time and money you plan to spend will be paid back in communication effectiveness.

■Content. To include various media elements in a document, you obviously need to create or acquire them. Millions of graphics, photos, video clips, and other elements are available online, but you need to make sure you can legally use each item. One good option is to search Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) for multimedia elements available for use at no charge but with various restrictions (such as giving the creator credit).

■Message structure. Multimedia documents often lack a rigid linear structure from beginning to end, which means you need to plan for readers to take multiple, individualized paths through the material. In other words, a conventional outline is often inadequate. Chapter 11 discusses the challenge of information architecture, the structure and navigational flow of websites and other multimedia documents.

■Compatibility. Some multimedia elements require specific software to be installed on the recipient’s viewing device. Another challenge is the variety of screen sizes and resolutions, from large, high-resolution computer monitors to tiny, low-resolution phone displays. Make sure you understand the demands your message will place on the audience.

Production tools vary widely, depending on the software and systems you’re using. Some systems offer limited formatting and production capabilities, whereas some word processing software now offers some capabilities that rival those of professional publishing software for many day-to- day business needs. Desktop publishing software, such as Adobe InDesign, goes beyond word processing, offering more advanced and precise layout capabilities that meet the technical demands of publication-quality printing. (These programs are used mainly by design professionals.)

For online content, web publishing systems make it easy to produce great-looking webpages quickly. Similarly, blogging systems now simplify the production of blog content, letting you rapidly post new material without worrying too much about design or production. A variety of tools also make it relatively simple to create multimedia presentations, such as screencasts (see Figure 5.4).

No matter what system you’re using, become familiar with the basic formatting capabilities. A few hours of exploration on your own or an introductory training course can help you dramatically improve the production quality of your documents. Depending on the types of messages you’re creating, you’ll benefit from being proficient with the following features:

■Templates, themes, and style sheets. As Chapter 4 notes, you can save a tremendous amount of time and ensure consistency by using templates, themes, and style sheets.

■Page setup. Use page setup to control margins, orientation (portrait is vertical; landscape is horizontal), and the location of headers (text and graphics that repeat at the top of every page) and footers (similar to headers but at the bottom of the page).

■Column formatting. Most business documents use a single column of text, but multiple columns can be an attractive format for documents such as newsletters. Columns are also handy for formatting long lists.

■Paragraph formatting. Take advantage of paragraph formatting controls to enhance the look of your documents. For instance, you can offset quotations by increasing margin width around a single paragraph, subtly compress line spacing to fit a document on a single page, or use hanging indents to offset the first line of a paragraph.

Learn to use your communication tools effectively so that you can work productively.

Paragraph formatting gives you greater control over the look of your documents.

Figure 5.4 Multimedia Tools

Desktop software tools such as the Camtasia screencasting program let business communicators assemble a variety of multimedia documents and presentations.

Source: Copyright © 2012 by TechSmith Corporation. Reprinted with permission.