Graphic Design for Administrative Professionals

Administrative professionals without any graphic or art background may be asked to produce a a basic newsletter. Here is a primer so that your work doesn't look like it came from "The Lindberg Baby Kidnapping School of Fine Typography" or more simply, communications that convey a mishmash of fonts more appropriately designed to foil an FBI investigation than to convey a message.

Word comes equipped with a variety of tools that can help achieve a professional look. Templates for example. A template is a cookie cutter document that lays out a basic format. Before starting any design project, take a look at what others have done before. Accessing this link will bring you to the complete list: office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/default.aspx..

Once step up in difficulty from simply accessing and following a pre-set format is to use Themes. New for the 2007 version of Word are complete "Themes" that have been designed to work harmoniously together by professional graphic artists. These control the entire appearance of the page, ranging from the color of the page and fonts, through type sizes, weights, font families and so forth so that you can access the knowledge and training of a graphic artist pro without being one yourself.

Styles, have been used by legal secretaries and creators of long documents for years. These allow a little more flexibility than using a pre-set template or theme while still ensuring that every heading at a particular level matches every other. Make yourself familiar with applying and modifying styles and you will save many hours of proofreading and jarring changes of appearance throughout your document.

Familiarize yourself with the various "Views" available. These allow you to more quickly scan large documents, or see how facing pages look together.

If you are going to be working with others, investigate the review functions that allow you to quickly determine who has made what changes and reject the changes of a tyro if they conflict with the alterations made by the president.

If you decide to design the whole newsletter from scratch, keep a swipe file. This is a file that contains attractive examples of other people's work. You need to see what works. Fonts are not just type, they are languages too.

The typeface you use will express:

The time you want to evoke: Modern or traditional. Shakespeare's day? The roaring 20's? Art Deco ? Today?

The age of the audience: Century Schoolbook or Bookface for the My Weekly Reader crowd. Times Roman for adult readers of, what else? The New York Times.

Place: Exotic or Viner Handfont means Asia. Broadway Bold for the carnivals and fairways of the American Circus. Bremen BD BT for Germany. Charlesworth for Merry Olde England.

How formal? A clean Helvetica, Univers or Arial for day-to-day correspondence. Ribbon Font, TypoUpright BT for the engraved-invitation look.

Always remember that a little fancy stuff goes a long way. The eye-catching display fonts may be knockouts but they will quickly weary your reader. When in doubt, pick from the more invisible families designed as body copy for the bulk of your work. There is a reason that Times Roman, Helvetica, and Arial are used by the bulk of professional printers and are default selections for word processing.

Keep the eyes of your readers in mind. Just because you can cram text on every available part of your page doesn't mean you should. Paper costs pennies per sheet-your reader's attention is priceless. Leave ample white space at margins and in the "gutter," the space where the staples go in your page.

Don't forget the spacing between lines either. Leading is a point or two of white space kept between lines of type. The word processor takes care of that by default, but if you insist on messing with these measurements in the interests of saving space, you will get communications that look like a dog's dinner.

The eye has to be guided gently from article to article and told where stories end too. For this, you have "rules," thin lines that go above, below and to the sides of text, and "slugs," little decorative elements such as checkboxes or black squares that can be inserted at the end of an article to signify "stop."

Take out those examples from your swipe file. How are the pros guiding your eye? Pay attention to the rules, slugs and placement of picture and text.

No one can duplicate the taste, experience and technical training of professional typographers or artists, but careful attention to well-designed pieces will inform your work and make sure that it doesn't look like it was sent by a master criminal.

If you like this article, you may also like one of my other articles about graphic arts, business communications or using your computer more effectively:

www.associatedcontent.com/article/2128705/_improve_your_emails_appearance_and.html
www.associatedcontent.com/article/2022946/automate_and_organize_your_email.html
www.associatedcontent.com/article/1994098/turbocharge_your_computer.html

Here is a complete list of my articles:
www.associatedcontent.com/user/583548/mary_finn.html

Sources:

office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/default.aspx