Creative Tips #16: Dressing Up

Every so often, you need to put out something with a little bit of pizzazz: an information sheet to hand out at a trade show, maybe, invitations to the office party, or a sell sheet to encourage retailers to stock your product. Most small businesses, and almost all solo professionals such as consultants or health professionals, turn to either Microsoft Publisher, if they have it, or Microsoft Word. Both of these choices are the thing of which designers' nightmares are made of (yes, really), but if you need only a small quantity and you have a decent laser or inkjet printer either one can work if you stay within the limitations of the program.

If you need several hundred copies, find someone like me to design a piece that has maximum impact and can be produced on a regular printing press. The print quality will be far higher and the cost a whole lot less (like 80% less) than Kinko's or Office Depot.

But let's say you don't need more than a hundred or so, and you don't have time to get an outside designer involved. Or you're just the strong, rugged type who likes to go it alone. Read on...

How to Make Good-Looking Fliers with Word

Here are some basic rules for making your flier or sell sheet look terrific in Word. All of these apply equally to Publisher.

Resist the temptation to center everything

This is a hard one for most people, but important enough to put first on the list. Except for one-line headlines (and even for those, in many cases) centering is almost always an error, because a centered layout is STATIC. It's balanced, so it has no motion, no sense of action, no force.

Centered text is also harder to read, because we are used to each line beginning at the same place in the left margin. When you click that "Center" button, you ensure that every line will start at a different place. Try it with a paragraph or two and you'll see what I mean.

Center your main headline, but not the rest.

Use at most two fonts, and make them very different

One of the most amateur-looking things you can do is go wild with your font list and try to dress up your document with five or six different typefaces. Your message drowns in the noise of six different voices all speaking simultaneously. Stick with a good, bold sans serif font for headlines. If this is an office party invitation, or a rummage sale announcement, use something fun for the headlines and a serif font for text, or use just one typeface in different sizes and weights.

Avoid the generic typefaces: Arial, Helvetica (which isn't a very readable typeface, by the way), and Times. New versions of Microsoft Office use a face called Calibri as the default. It works well on screen, but is not as successful when printed. You should avoid it in a flier or other promotional material, because it has the same "instant recognition" factor that tells people you weren't interested enough, or you don't know enough, to actually pick a font.

Don't forget the white space!

If there's one thing that makes a sell sheet or flier look amateur, it's tiny margins. The impression that a company or writer has tried to cram everything into one page (to save money, or for lack of writing skill) is not one that you want to give. There's more on this topic in Creative Tips #2.

If you find that you can't get everything in unless you reduce the margins to less than 1.5 inches, go through your text and cut it down. I guarantee that you can reduce the text by at least 15 percent, and you will make your message more powerful at the same time. Besides, cramped layouts are much less likely to be read in the first place, so you not only make your piece look better, you also gain readers.

The same goes for space between the lines, which we've looked at in some detail in Creative Tips #3. Text that has room to breath won't suffocate your reader.

Whatever you do, don't use clip art

Sure, clip art is cute, it's free, and there's lots of it about. Here's the problem: it is immediately recognizable as clip art, and it spells "a-m-a-t-e-u-r" in loud, garish letters.

If you want to dress up your flier, sell sheet or ad, use real photographs, or go to a stock photo site like Fotolia.com or iStockPhoto.com where you'll find an incredible variety of photographs and illustrations for just about any conceivable message, at prices as low as $1. The difference in the impact of your presentation will astound you.

The one exception to this rule is when you want the "clip art look" for humorous effect in something that you want to look silly. That's perfectly legitimate, as long as it's clear that the hokey look is intentional.

Bonus Tip

I'll be blogging a bit about the upcoming Office 2010 suite. Follow the posts and join in the discussions on the blog.

Happy typesetting,

Alan Gilbertson
Creative Director
G&G Creative

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.