Whitbread D. The Design Manual (анг.яз.)

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Document quick fix

When confronted with a document design task, many

people feel unable to start, ﬁnding it difﬁcult because there

are too many possibilities. So is there a quick ﬁx? There are

tried and true formulas that mean you are unlikely to go too

far wrong and, if nothing else, will save you from reading

all the how-to books and getting confused with the conﬂict-

ing advice.

Please remember: This advice is for the person who is too

busy to weigh up the options and wants a quick guide. It is

just a recommended series of rules that will produce safe,

readable text layouts on your word-processing or page

layout program.

Format

With any page size larger than B5 you should be looking at

two or more columns. The columns do not have to be even:

for example, in books and reports there might be one major

column and a smaller side column for headings and quotes.

An A4 page should have two columns in a book or at

least three columns in a newsletter.

The gutter between columns should be 5 mm.

Start with 15 mm margins all around. Margins should be

larger at the foot than at the head of the page and, if your

pages are facing pages, the inner margins should be

smaller than the outer margins (except in the case of

documents produced for ring binders).

Text should be set unjustiﬁed with minimal, if any,

hyphenation.

Avoid justiﬁed setting as it relies so much on good

hyphenation decisions, and hyphenation in most word-

processing and page layout programs is not complex

enough to make an even text block. Most people use

justiﬁed setting to look neat but it often is quite the

opposite due to uneven text colour because of its variable

space distribution through the lines.

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Use paragraph indents of 5 mm. However, preferably

override the indent for opening paragraphs or ﬁrst para-

graphs after headings and lists.

Set two left tabs straight away: at 5 mm and 10 mm.

This covers the requirement for lists. Do not indent the dot

points in lists—they should be at the beginning of the line.

The indent for the list entry is at 5 mm, the same point as

the paragraph indent.

Avoid layers of many indents, except in tables where the

tabular information dictates the type of tabs required.

Typeface selection

Select a serif typeface for the text and use at least the default

recommendation of 120% leading (inter-line spacing).

Set the text size to 10 point (and the default will create

12 point leading).

Despite recommendations against it, you might still be

required to set one column across an A4 page, so set the

leading to 16 points at least or, if you are in a word-

processing package, set your linespacing to line-and-a-half.

Using the text serif font, create the three following

headings for use within text (from most important to least):

r 10 point text-weight capitals (tracked a little loose)

r 10 point bold lower case

r 10 point italic lower case.

Use them from the bottom up the list—if there is only

one text heading, use the italics; if two text headings, use

the bold for the most important and the italics for the least;

if three, use the caps as the most important, the italics for

the least.

All headings should be ﬂush left unjustiﬁed—no centred

headings with unjustiﬁed text blocks.

Sans serif headings are recommended for main

headings and titles in books and headlines in newsletters.

Try these options in a sans serif font:

r 18 point extrabold lower case

r 14 point bold capitals (tracked a little loose)

r 14 point capitals (tracked a little loose)

r 18 point bold lower case

r 18 point lower case

This gives you ﬂexibility and allows eight levels of

headings when combined with the text font headings above.

You may want to replace the 10 point text font capitals with

9 point sans serif capitals (tracked a little loose). For an

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Document quick fix 233

The three recommended

picture boxes, each in ratio

3:4, with a 0.25 point black

border or frame

interesting heading option, create an 18 point italic lower-

case heading in your text font.

When creating your style sheet, always put more space

above a heading than below.

Use line returns in the 12 point setting to space the

headings or create style sheets with multiples or quotients

of 12 points: 6, 3, 4, 18, 24, 36 point spaces, etc.

Use italics where you are tempted to underline.

Don’t use the underline, outline or shadow attributes for

a font.

Pictures

Create three picture boxes (with a ﬁne black border or

frame at about 0.25 point width) and duplicate them for all

picture boxes:

r The ﬁrst should be one-column wide and about three-

quarters as deep (for landscape—or horizontal—format

photographs).

r The second should be one-column width and about one-

and-a-third times as deep (for portrait—or

vertical—format photographs).

r The third should be two columns wide (including the

gutter width) and about three-quarters as deep.

Place captions below all photographs ﬂush left with no

indent, unjustiﬁed in 10 point lower-case italics with initial

capital on ﬁrst word and set to the width of the picture box.

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Punctuation

Use minimal punctuation:

r no full stops between initials of names

r no commas on the end of lines of an address or list

r single quotes used ﬁrst; double quotes used within

quotes

r lower case for all words except proper nouns and ﬁrst

words.

Use smart quotes to achieve open and closing quote marks.

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Colour

Irrespective of likes or dislikes, the brighter the colour, the

greater its attraction. This is a physiological response—the

brightness stimulates the eye to a greater extent, which

partly explains children’s preference for bright colours.

Bright colours, or light colours, by deﬁnition have a high

reﬂection value—they look closer and larger and are easier

to recognise. As a general rule, they are exciting and good

for the mass market. They are brash and friendly. They are

good colours for accents and we consider them to be

younger, less conservative, extrovert and dynamic, and they

are more attractive to men. The light, bright colours are also

more popular in sunny climates and seasonally in spring

and summer.

Soft, dark and modiﬁed colours have an air of dignity

and restraint about them and are associated with up-market

audiences. They look further away and smaller than bright

colours. They reﬂect tradition and sentiment, and are

considered to be older, and they are more attractive to

women. They are the colours of the establishment and

sophistication. Soft, muted, dark and modiﬁed colours are

more popular in cloudy climates and seasonally in autumn

and winter.

Colour should be used mainly for attraction, not for

communication, so use it liberally in images, display text,

backgrounds and borders, but be particularly conservative

in its use in text. Never compromise the contrast of

foreground and background simply to create a colour effect.

Colour terminology uses hue to describe the pure form

of a colour that enables us to distinguish a yellow from an

orange. All colours have a tonal value as well as their hue.

The tonal value of a colour describes the grey it becomes on

a black-and-white monitor or in a black-and-white photo-

graph. Put simply, tonal value can be dark or light.

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When choosing a colour palette, select colours of similar

tonal value to do a similar job, such as when colour coding

a series of publications.

Tints are created when a hue is lightened. Tones, using

colour parlance, are created when a hue is deepened by the

addition of a darker colour, often black.

For a foreground to stand out from a background, the

tonal value can be altered. Make the background darker

and seemingly further away, hence the standard recommen-

dation that slides in the presentation industry have dark-

blue backgrounds with yellow text.

How readers view colour will depend on the lighting

conditions where they are reading or their screen setting

preferences for material on screen. Incandescent home

lighting gives a yellow cast as distinct from the blue–white

of ﬂuorescent store lighting and the ‘pure white’ of daylight.

Screens will often have their brightness dimmed and their

contrast diminished, and sometimes even have a tinted

screen over them to protect the viewer’s eyes. All these

choices and conditions will affect how the colours you select

are seen by the audience.

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DOING IT SMARTER

Spot colour

Establish a basic colour—often black

in text layouts—and use another

‘spot’ colour only for highlights. This

gives greater dynamism to the spot

colour—it can be more effective in its

attention-getting and interest-

arousing roles.

DOING IT SMARTER

Colour photos and

colour selection

If you want colours in your design to

complement the photography, choose

colours that appear somewhere in a

photograph—the most successful

choice is often not a dominant colour

in the photo.

To practise this skill, choose a

coloured photo and force yourself to

come up with three colour variations

using only background and border

colour variation. Assess the results to

determine which presented the

photograph most successfully. This

helps you to isolate the colours that

drain colour from an image from the

colours that may enhance it.

DOING IT SMARTER

Learning to use colour

To develop your skill in using colour,

create a project where you do not

allow yourself to include black or

white.

To test the psychological effect of

colours, try experimenting with a

colour portrait using just different

border and background colours, but

communicate these personality

attributes: strength, weakness,

coolness, warmth. You can see what

can be implied—why isn’t this used

more in, say, election advertising?

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Colour coding

Colour can identify an organisation or the type of document

a reader is perusing, or distinguish points of difference

between one printed piece and another. Coding enables

people to quickly ﬁnd what they need.

Allocate a colour, or a series of colours, to each variable.

The colours, when used consistently, become associated

with a particular style of document or information, and

effectively code material. It can be a code established for

use within one publication or over a range of corporate

materials.

Choose a colour to represent each arm of the organ-

isation—the rainbow of colours represents the corporate

palette for an organisation. Maybe one overriding colour

links them all.

When selecting colour for a series, try to maintain a

similar tonal value. For example, with a burgundy, steel

blue and bottle green, you would not select a bright

orange—tonally the orange would be the odd one out—

but you might select a burnt orange or even a terracotta

in order for the palette to have parity.

Similarly, with pastels, you would not add a charcoal.

A more tonally appropriate choice would be a pearl grey.

Of course, maybe the charcoal grey could become the

standard instead of, for example, black text. It would be

softer than black and perhaps sit more comfortably with

the pastels.

Also, the charcoal grey—as the bright orange in the

previous example—could become the over-arching corpor-

ate colour, because of its contrast to the established palette.

Colour 237

DOING IT SMARTER■

Achieving colour balance

Consider the colour and tonal

arrangement of your elements. Try to

reduce your layout to a Mondrian-like

composition. It is an effective way to

analyse the interrelationship of the

colours of your elements.

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Colour systems

Colour reproduction is one of the most exasperating and

frustrating challenges for the graphic designer who is trying

to control colour through all stages of a project, from

concept to rough, approval, screen and print. The computer

has not made colour control any easier.

The problem

You are designing a two-colour job. You create the design

on screen, selecting the colours from the palettes on screen,

and it looks great on screen. You print the design to your

colour printer to proof it for your client. You send the job to

a printing house which prints it in the Pantone colours

speciﬁed by the computer printout. The printed result is

neither the colours you saw on screen, nor the colours of

the computer printout.

Why is it that with 16 million colours, you still can’t get

the colour you want?

Let’s visit the scenario again, step by step.

You created the job for the colours that looked good on

screen. Your monitor uses the RGB (red, green, blue) colour

system developed for television. When all the red, green

and blue lights are on at full power, the screen is white.

When they are all off, the screen is black. When they use

varying intensities of red, blue and green light, they create

all the colours you can see on screen.

Next, you proofed the design on a colour printer that

uses the four-colour process similar in principle but not

identical to the printing industry’s four-colour process.

When all the colours are printed together, they produce

black. When there are none of them, the image is white (or

whatever the colour of the paper you have printed the

image on). When you use dots of varying size of the four

colours, and overlap them, they create all the colours you

can see in most magazines and catalogues.

Finally, when you printed the piece using the Pantone

colours, you used colours that were mixed from chemicals

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different from those used in the four process colours and

with an entirely different system of colour generation

from the way colour is created on screen. Being transparent

as most inks are, the colour surface and density of the

paper on which they are printed alters them. There is

room for error.

So sometimes a simple thing like matching a single

corporate colour across a range of corporate material is

impossible. That corporate red has a hint of burgundy

in the washroom towels with corporate insignia; it’s a

lighter dyelot for the corporate umbrella; on that west-

facing exterior awning, it has faded to almost yellow; in

the annual report it looks like a ripe tomato; in the rafﬂe

tickets it looks like a jaffa orange; in the Yellow Pages ad,

it is a murky rust; and on the Web site, it is a luminous

beacon of pulsating light.

Got the picture? You do not have colour control.