Studiografik Design Marketing in Print Articles, Editorial Design Layout, Birmingham, West Midlands and South, UK.
Most readers live in the fast lane, in danger of being overtaken or overwhelmed by information. Any communication can get lost or garbled and fades like the resonance of a passing car.
The Editorial Hand
The keen editorial hand will stop, hook, guide and direct the traffic through the experience to the pertinent and important drop off points. Employing imagination, personality and the individuality of the concept through the use of layout, type, graphics, colour, proportion and balance. The signals attached to these components determine their hierarchy and importance, not only in the context of the material but also in the psyche of the viewer.
Pointing Readers in the Right Direction
All readers have picked up habits and idiosyncrasies, so don't necessarily read brochures, catalogues or magazines in any logical order. There is tendency to scan, registering images first, reading conclusions and focusing on the first couple of lines of a paragraph. Rather like a jigsaw puzzle, where the edges are pieced together first before filling in the gaps.
The Art of Layout is Motivation
The strength of any layout lies within the form and functionality it is designed to serve. Each media employed in print has it's own criteria and composition to be considered.
Printed literature can range in size to fit a pocket or sit on coffee table. Posters and press advertising the rely the big concept as a major design driver. Direct mail and postcards need to juggle information, message and action within limited constraints.
Layouts evoke the tone of any printed material. Fast paced, full in your face, product orientated, sublime simplicity with a clarity of expression or complete economy of space. Composition evolves from how the balance, shape, graphics, images, colour and typography is expressed.
Hooks and Guides
People will make the time and take the effort to read great novels and long technical texts of worth to them. They approach the ephemera of marketing, visual communications, promotional literature and advertising with a cursory glance and then generally dismiss it without further investigation.
Concepts are the hooks that reel in the readers. Wherever a mark is trying to made, on a cover, in full page press adverting or on a billboard, use evocative visual language, simple to understand and relevant to the viewer.
For brochures and publications shape the priorities and main points to answer the basic questions that readers are going to have. Make them prominent, easily picked out and first to be registered.
Create a visual hierarchy that uses strong headlines to grab attention, striking imagery to develop interest and finally compelling text to deliver the message. Notable headlines will always catch the readers eye. Photography communicates literally. Illustrations and graphic diagrams are useful for highlighting special features that interpret technical information at glance. Titles for graphics and captions will clarify the information being displayed.
Grids and patterns play a significant role in readability and retention. Generous margins and gutters around text and images create open spaces where important points can be projected. Splitting the page width into columns creates more visual interest and helps create a coherent link between relative text and imagery.
Serif or sans serif?
Type is the mortar in building the layout, so choice of font, weight and colour can make or break it.
For text serif typefaces (Times, Garamond and Palatino) do help readers recognize characters more quickly, the tiny strokes on each character lead the eye across the page form word to word. These fonts are well suited to situations where there is a large amount of written copy, such as technical literature, text books and magazines.
Sans serif typefaces (Arial, Avant Garde and Trebuchet) are cleaner and have simpler shapes, so have become common for the smaller amounts of text that generally predominate most contemporary printed marketing material.
Use cartoon, gothic, script, fancy and artistic typefaces carefully. They are unsuitable for main body copy, but can be used creatively to reinforce a concept, as a logo typestyle, initials or as an evocation of emotion in headlines.
Break Up Text, it's for the Best
After hooking a reader, get your message home by using short sentences, bereft of industry jargon or technical language. Being brief and concise maintains the readers interest. Long lines of small type becomes tedious to read. Small bites of text will also allow more flexibility in the layout to add the images that add even more interest to the message.
Where text is broken with sub headings, make them stand out with devices such a bold sans serif text, rules or pointers. These become the appetizers and aperitifs of small chunks of text that seem easy read and will not take much effort.
If there is so much text that it has to be jemmied into layouts, take a blue pencil or pen and cut and cut again.
The Final Word - Proofreading
Often overlooked at the last minute, proofreading is one of the most important tasks when you market or communicate in print. Even if you feel you've looked at the final work so many times that there can't be any mistakes, why not ask someone else to read it over too? A second set of eyes may find something you missed. With even one typo or misspelled word, credibility and quality could suffer.
Double check for homonyms, words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings and words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings. Also proper nouns, names of specific people, places and products, beginning with a capital letter wherever it occurs, should be carefully proofed.
Be extra careful with jargon, check unique technology terms and abbreviations; - and make sure numbers in telephone details, statistics and technical information are completely accurate.
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