Chapter 2

Success by Design

In This Chapter

bullet Knowing your audience

bullet Analyzing other people’s projects

bullet Discovering the keys to design success

bullet Publishing with style

bullet Working within a budget

We live in a fast age. Before, you had time to read the occasional ad or brochure that appeared in your mailbox; now, you may receive dozens of mailings every day. We’re bombarded with so much stuff that we tend to ignore most of it.

So here’s the deal. Your publication has five seconds to get someone’s attention. (Some design gurus claim that most pieces get about two seconds of review before being tossed.) If your published piece doesn’t have something that interests your audience and makes people want to explore it further — poof! — it’s gone.

If you have only five seconds, you had better make sure that your primary message is the first thing a reader sees. You have little room for error on this score. Consider any design device that you can use to repeat — and build on — the primary message.

This chapter shows you the design basics necessary to do your work in Microsoft Publisher 2007 quickly and well.

Know Your Audience

The first step to creating a successful project is figuring out who your audience is and how they will interact with your work. Knowing your audience helps you refine your publication’s look and feel. In addition, it helps you determine your writing style, which is essential for good communication.

You can learn a lot about successful design by studying the work of marketing gurus, particularly those who work in advertising. Advertising combines a creative art form with statistically measured results based on large populations of target markets. One of my favorite books on this topic is Design for Response: Creative Direct Marketing That Works, by Leslie Sherr and David J. Katz (published by Rockport Publishers).

While you’re designing your publication, show it to prospective members of your target audience so that you can figure out what they need. If your target audience is college students, for example, you might show your publication to several college students and solicit their feedback before you go to the trouble and expense of having it printed.

When you know your audience, you can create a publication that has the correct “voice” or “tone” for that group. For example, a typeface that looks like lettering on a ransom note is inappropriate for business correspondence but may be perfect for birthday party invitations. Publisher has thousands of professionally designed templates, 50 font schemes (collections of fonts that look good together in a publication), and more than 90 coordinated color schemes. Finding one that’s appropriate to your audience shouldn’t be too difficult.

If you’re picky and you don’t like any of the hundreds of fonts that come with Publisher, you can always buy more. Some vendors sell type in packages designed for specific uses. Their catalogs (which are works of art in themselves) describe the best uses for many typefaces and also suggest typefaces that work well together.

Where Others Have Gone Before

When I start the design phase of a publishing project, I try to collect the best examples of work in that area. I look at the overall design of any piece I collect and look for style elements that I can use as a springboard to creating my own style. Keep file folders of ads you like, marketing pieces you get in the mail, and other publications. Then, when you’re ready to create a piece, you can sit down and peruse your samples. Invariably, you’ll find an idea or two to get you started. If you don’t find anything that strikes your fancy, try one of the many templates that Publisher provides.

Any artwork, images, templates, or designs you find in Publisher and its Design Gallery are there for your use. The following list specifies, according to the Microsoft Software License Terms (MSLT), what you cannot do with the media elements (photos, clip art, fonts, and images, for example) in Publisher:

bullet Sell, license or distribute copies of the media elements on a stand-alone basis or as part of any collection, product, or service where the primary value of the product or service is the media element

bullet Use or distribute any of the media elements that include representations of identifiable individuals, governments, logos, initials, emblems, trademarks, or entities for any commercial purposes or to express or imply any endorsement or association with any product, service, entity, or activity

bullet Create obscene or scandalous works, as defined by federal law at the time the work is created, using the media elements

bullet Permit third parties to distribute copies of the media elements except as part of your product or service

Also, according to the terms of the license, you must

bullet Indemnify, hold harmless, and defend Microsoft from and against any claims or lawsuits, including attorneys’ fees, that arise from or result from the use or distribution of the media elements as modified by you

bullet Include a valid copyright notice on your products and services that include copies of the media elements

You cannot and should not copy an entire design or image from someone else. That’s illegal. Most designs are copyrighted by their authors. When you use other people’s work, you can, however, adapt the designs you collect, borrowing an idea here and an idea there.

Sometimes a fine line exists between adapting an idea and copying one. You need to use good judgment. Note that the law in this area is volatile and subject to change. I recommend The Desktop Publisher’s Legal Handbook, by Daniel Sitarz (Nova Publishing Company) as a good place to start learning about these issues.

Another resource to use when beginning the design phase is a study of before-and-after makeovers. You can find case studies in the design makeover columns in desktop publishing magazines and in some specialized books on desktop publishing. The following resources take this approach:

bullet Books:

• Looking Good in Print, 4th Edition, by Roger C. Parker and Patrick Berry (published by Coriolis Group Books.)

bullet Magazines:

• Before & After (www.bamagazine.com), an online magazine that tells you “how to design cool stuff”

• Communication Arts (www.commarts.com), the world’s largest “magazine on creativity for graphic designers, art directors, copywriters, photographers, illustrators and multimedia designers.”

The Keys to Design Success

Most design gurus agree that you can apply certain principles to your designs to make them easier to understand and more attractive to the reader. Although the exact terminology for these principles may vary, the set of principles is nearly always the same.

When you begin to design a publication, you may not always analyze your work in terms of these principles, but you should at least keep them in mind:

bullet Be consistent. Elements on a page should be repeated in appropriate places. Consistency is particularly important in longer publications, such as books. The more structured your design, the easier it is to produce the piece.

The best way to enforce consistent design is to create a meaningful style sheet for your publication. A style sheet is a collection of styles that allows you to keep your publication consistent and make quick changes. Publisher can help you apply styles or formats to text, objects, tables, and other page elements. Just as word processing documents can have style sheets, Publisher can import or create text styles. You can put together your Publisher project more quickly and more consistently if you use a well-developed style sheet and template rather than simply develop on the fly.

Keep in mind that using one of thousands of templates that Publisher offers is a good way to ensure consistency. For example, you can create a letterhead starting with a Publisher template and then customize the letterhead to your liking. After you’re satisfied with the look of the letterhead, you can click the Change Template button in the Publisher Tasks pane and select Envelope to create an envelope with the same “look and feel” as the letterhead.

bullet Put things where people tend to see them. People have a tendency to view a page in a diagonal direction, from the upper left to the lower right. Elements in the center of the page get the most attention; elements in the upper-left and lower-right areas get the least attention.

Your design should treat a two-page spread as though it were a single page because the entire two-page spread is the unit of design that readers see.

bullet Keep your message simple. To make your reader focus on your content, follow these guidelines:

• Use white space. Many well-designed pieces have a white space content of 50 percent.

• Limit yourself to no more than two fonts on a page. You may have noticed that all font schemes in Publisher consist of two fonts.

• Be judicious with color — apply it as highlighting. You want to use color to enhance, not distract from, the message you’re trying to get across.

bullet Keep related or similar information on a page. Keep related information close together or aligned.

You can create a block of related elements by separating them from other elements on the page with rules (lines), frames (boxes), or white space. Likewise, if a graphical image relates to a story, the image should appear close to the story. Any caption for the image should appear close to it — just like the graphics in this book.

bullet Align everything on a page with something. Create a grid and place your page elements on that grid, as described in Chapter 4. Creating this type of page grid for a layout is similar to creating an outline for a written document.

The same page grid can produce order on pages without producing pages that look alike. For example, three- and four-column newspapers and newsletters are common because you can produce many looks within those formats. You can have blocks in the grid that aren’t filled in, for example, and graphics that span multiple blocks. Figure 2-1 shows a four-column grid with three rows. This layout generates 12 blocks and offers a lot of flexibility. Figures 2-2 through 2-4 show you three examples that use this grid layout.

bullet Provide contrast to enliven your work. Balance consistency by doing the unexpected.

bullet Use a page hierarchy. If you use a large headline, readers will probably start reading the page there. You can use smaller headlines to divide a page into sections. You can also use vertical and horizontal rules to break your page into blocks and provide contrast. Emphasize important information by making it look different, but don’t emphasize parts of your page that have less importance.

The columns in your page grid don’t have to be the same width, and the pages in a two-page spread don’t have to be balanced or symmetrical. Balanced pages seem boring. I tend to vary the size and placement of graphics across columns. I also favor the use of sidebars, pull-quotes (short statements that summarize information on a page), large initial capitals, and column shadings to break up the page.

Figure 2-1: A 4-x-3 page grid.

 Figure 2-1: A 4-x-3 page grid.

Figure 2-2: The 4-x-3 page grid with a three-column setup.

 Figure 2-2: The 4-x-3 page grid with a three-column setup.

Figure 2-3: The 4-x-3 page grid with a two-column setup.

 Figure 2-3: The 4-x-3 page grid with a two-column setup.

Figure 2-4: The 4-x-3 page grid with a single-column setup.

 Figure 2-4: The 4-x-3 page grid with a single-column setup.

Desktop Style Resources

Desktop publishing has turned millions of people into typographers and typesetters. Using type and working with typography aren’t skills that come naturally to most people, however. The many rules and guidelines specific to page layout don’t pertain to typewritten text or text prepared in word processors. The resources in this section can help you make the transition from text documents to desktop publications.

Two of the most accepted style guides for clear writing in the United States for the English language are

bullet The Elements of Style, 4th Edition, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White (published by Longman)

bullet The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition (published by University of Chicago Press)

A number of texts specialize in the handling of type. In addition to The Chicago Manual of Style, the following books are type-worthy additions to your library:

bullet Words into Type, 3rd Edition, by Marjorie Skillin and Robert Malcom Gay (published by Prentice Hall)

bullet New Hart’s Rules: The Handbook of Style for Writers and Editors, by R. M. Ritter, ed. (published by Oxford University Press)

bullet Pocket Pal: The Handy Little Book of Graphic Arts Production, 19th Edition, by Michael Bruno (published by International Paper Company)

The following two small texts are noteworthy for beginning users because they deal with typographical issues in a friendly way:

bullet The PC Is Not a Typewriter, by Robin Williams (published by Peachpit Press)

bullet The Desktop Style Guide, by James Felici (published by Random House Information Group)

Desktop publishing has its own language. Each typography reference work mentioned in this section helps you keep your picas separate from your points, your en dashes from your em dashes, and your verso from your recto.

Everything Costs Money

Your budget can play a prominent role in the design of your publication. You don’t want to merrily design something only to be shocked by the sticker price when you arrive at the printer. A good designer always asks up front “How much were you intending to spend?” because it helps to ground the project in reality. Perhaps good designers ask the question also because it helps them set their pay scale.

Just because a project has a limited budget doesn’t mean that the publica-tion has to be poorly designed. Publisher was created with the idea that you can create professional-looking publications without busting your budget. You must simply rely on techniques that not only enhance your work but also stay within your budget. I have seen creative, effective, and attractive pieces produced on limited budgets, and I have seen expensively designed pieces that belong in the Desktop Publishing Hall of Shame. It takes experience and good judgment to get the most out of what you have to spend.

Keep in mind that simpler usually translates into “less expensive.” Monochrome printed on plain bond paper generally costs less than four-color printed on specialty paper. The fancier you get, the more you’re likely to spend. Talk to the friendly folks at the print shop you plan to use. They can provide guidance on cost versus quality. Sometimes you get lucky, and they can offer a premium-quality paper for a reduced cost because someone else canceled an order.

Establish a good working relationship with the staff at your print shop. They can help you in the early design phase by suggesting paper and color selections. Inquire about their price breaks for quantity printing. They can also supply you with the correct printer driver to install so that your design is only formatted correctly on your screen but also prints correctly to their printer.