CH 3: Design & Visuals

Document Design

All documents have a purpose—to persuade, to inform, to instruct, to entertain—but the foremost purpose of any document is to be read. Choosing effective document design enhances the readability or usability of your document so that it is more likely to achieve its intended purpose.

Keep in mind that people do not read technical writing documents for pleasure or entertainment; they read them because it’s part of their job or because they need information. Your job as the document designer is to make your audience’s reading process as easy, clear, useful, and efficient as possible by employing all the tools at your disposal. It’s important to choose design elements that make documents user-friendly for your target audience.

For print documents, technical communicators usually focus on page design—text size, font type, color, sections with headers, bullet points, and the placement of text and images on the page. Designing a document is like designing anything else: you must define your purpose (the goals and objectives you hope to achieve), understand your audience (who will read this document and why), and choose design features that will best convey your message, achieve your purpose, and suit your audience.

Document design refers to the physical appearance of a document. In technical communication, the goal is typically to convey information—to explain how to do something, describe how something was done, teach a new concept, sell something, or even accept a new point of view. Designing your document effectively can help ensure that readers understand how to use it. Your audience sees your document before they actually read its content; therefore, well-designed documents should work to help readers to easily navigate the information. Conversely, when a reader encounters a poorly-designed document, they may become frustrated and miss important information, or they may decide not to read it at all. No matter how important or interesting the content is, if it is not formatted in way that enhances readability, it will likely not receive the attention it deserves.

The following sections of this chapter include information on how technical writers use visuals and document design features to optimize readability, including page design and layout elements, such as lists, tables, headings and subheadings, bullet points, and bold text.

The following video from Gregg Learning, “What You Need to Know About Business Document Design,” provides a good introduction to the elements of basic document design:

Visuals

Visual elements, such as graphs, charts, tables, photographs, diagrams, and maps can capture your readers’ attention and help them to understand your ideas more fully. They are like illustrations that help tell the document’s story. These visuals can help to enhance your written ideas, simplify dense textual descriptions, and help readers understand a complicated process or complex data. A key point to remember here is that visuals clarify, illustrate, and augment your written text; they should not act as a replacement for written text, but using them effectively can save you from having to include additional explanations and clarifications. At the same time, it’s important to understand that visuals should mainly be used to reinforce a document’s textual information. Of course, using an image solely for decorative purposes can be useful at times to help break up blocks of text and give readers a visual break from the text, but be sure to do this sparingly—images should not just be “gratuitous,” as this can potentially confuse your audience or appear to emphasize something that is not crucial to the overall message.

It is important to choose the right kind of visual to convey the story you want your reader to understand. If visuals are poorly chosen or poorly designed for the task, they can actually create negative consequences. Section 3.2 of this book, “Using Visuals,” will provide specific tips and examples for using visuals effectively.

Additional Resources 

• “Common Page Design,” by David McMurrey and Jonathan Arnett, Open Technical Communication.

"Figures and Tables." Technical Writing Essentials. [License: CC BY 4.0]
"What You Need to Know about Document Design." Uploaded by Gregg Learning, 23 Oct., 2015. YouTube.com.