Creative Tips For Your Office Documents

Welcome to the first edition of the Creative Tips newsletter.

My purpose for "Creative Tips" is to help you make better looking documents using the tools you already have, which in most cases will be some version of Microsoft Office.

Designers work with very sophisticated software that allows terrific flexibility in putting together a page layout. While it's true that these programs are much more powerful and useful for the designer, it's also true that they are expensive, and not easy to learn.

Just because Microsoft Publisher or Word are designed for the amateur, that doesn't mean you can't get good looking results with them. You won't be able to do sophisticated layouts, but for day to day purposes they are quite adequate.

The secret to better looking documents is to follow a few rules that will put you in command of your tools and let you break out of the cookie-cutter mold that these programs want to put you in.

May your documents never be the same (as everyone else's)!

Alan Gilbertson
Creative Director
G&G Creative

Now read on...

Looking Good With Word

Microsoft Word is everywhere. There probably isn't a company or small business that doesn't use it to create letters, proposals, estimates, promotional emails, even flyers and ads for the Yellow Pages. The "desktop publishing revolution" was supposed to put great-looking documents in reach of Everyman and change the world, feed the poor, end war and in general make life happy.

Why, then, did these great-looking documents not happen? Why do we flinch, ever so slightly, whenever we see something obviously produced on the kitchen table? What is it that makes something look like it was produced on the kitchen table (besides the ketchup stains)?

Technology is a wonderful thing, but it doesn't substitute for the human eye, and there's also this annoying fact: it takes time to learn how to use the stuff. In the interest of creating a more aesthetic environment for everyone, I'm going to explore, in these next few newsletters, things you can do to make your letters, proposals and, yes, even your quick promotional flyers better looking and, more important, more inviting to the reader.

Let's start with something really basic.

Defaults Are Not Necessarily Good For Your Image

Almost no-one gets away from Word's default settings. We see endless swaths of Times New Roman to the point that most people are really, really tired of it. And that's the first clue to kitchen-table design. Times New Roman screams: "I'm using Microsoft Word or Publisher, but I'm not sure what to do with it."

The original Times font was created for (surprise) The Times newspaper of London, England. It is designed to read well in narrow columns of text, so the letters themselves are narrow. This heritage lends a certain dignity to Times New Roman (Times Roman on the Mac), but because it's been so overused it has now become thoroughly boring. More to the point: in a Word document it is almost NEVER in narrow columns, so it is fighting its own design and is actually less comfortable to read than many alternatives.

Your computer has a number of fine-looking typefaces (designers call them that, because the term "font" means something more specific: Arial Bold and Arial Italic are two different fonts in the same typeface, and in the old days of metal type, each size was its own font). Palatino. Bookman Oldstyle and Book Antiqua are all excellent, very readable typefaces that are almost universal. If you have Word, you have these typefaces.

Notice the difference? The wider character shapes are easier on the eye, especially in longer lines of text. Your readers may not know why, but they will find your text more inviting, and more comfortable to read.

So here's the first tip: To make your document look more professional, click on that drop-down arrow beside "Times New Roman" in the toolbar, and pick a more readable typeface. Your presentation will immediately move up a notch, and all your communications will look and feel that much more professional.

Oh, and a BONUS TIP for these economy-minded times: Arial and similar typefaces (like the one you're reading now) use almost twice as much toner or ink as the ones illustrated above, because all the lines in the characters are the same thickness. A typeface that has thick and thin lines is more readable and saves you money on your office printing.

Next time: Spacing and Indents. Some easy ways to make your documents easier to create, easier to edit, and much more attractive.

 

The Creative Tips newsletter is published by G&G Creative, Tujunga, CA. More at www.gngcreative.com or on the blog.

G&G Creative specializes in graphic design, photography and copy writing for print and the web.

Copyright © 2009 Alan Gilbertson. All Rights Reserved.