All the time we visit organisations who wear their lack of a strong marketing function as some kind of badge of honour. Invariably, they have a strong engineering culture, and show obvious glee and pride that they are successful despite being clueless about marketing. “If we build it they will come”. If you’re not entangled within one of these corporate lies, it’s easy to drive a mile-wide hole through the obvious fallacy, but the problem is usually endemic, and is often entrenched - from the leadership to the shop floor.

Cultures like this can cause huge unintended knock-on effects - from losing out on the extra business that a compelling marketing story would generate, to the more mundane stress and confusion created when well-intentioned but unqualified people are forced to produce communications products.

A company like this probably doesn’t have much of a marketing budget - so it isn’t in the habit of buying the software and tools you’d find in a regular marketing department. It probably doesn’t employ professional communicators, and probably doesn’t even begin to understand that communication is about far more than ‘words’. Worse still, it probably doesn’t even grasp the basic fact that business begins by communicating.

Having met lots of such companies - and I have to apologetically admit that they are particularly prevalent in the UK - our antennae can sniff them out at long range. All we usually do is ask to see some pre-sales, customer-visible documents, like brochures and flyers and so on. And you know, the story they tell is writ large in their simple presentation - we rarely even have to read a word!

 Look at these two thumbnails:

The two documents are intended to perform the same function by their respective authors - they are white papers, discussing how their organisations can address topical IT themes. But honestly - which one would you prefer to read? You don’t have to read any of the words to be more drawn to the rightmost option, which uses simple presentational cues to make itself inviting to the potential reader.

Which at last brings us to graphic design for teams without graphic designers. If you work for one of those companies that doesn’t belive in marketing, doesn’t own a copy of Illustrator or InDesign, and doesn’t have a graphic designer, there’s still no excuse for alienating your potential readers before they’ve had a chance to read a word. Happily, the road to enlightenment has a small number of clear milestones:

1. White space is as significant a compositional element as the rest of your content - use it liberally to relieve your reader’s psychological burden and provide boundaries around related concepts.
2. Use signposts in the form of colour, typeface and style to attract and guide the scanning reader - a reader interested in gleaning concepts and overview more than detail.
3. Paragraphs should be separated by one blank line, and deal with one key concept.
4. Use a grid system to create page styles that run throughout the document - don’t create a unique layout for each page.
5. In print (rather than online), two-column text is generally easier to read than one-column, because the reader’s focus doesn’t have to travel so far for each new line.
6. Adjusting a document’s presentation like this will take some time, so be sure to budget for it, and that your boss and co-workers understand the need for it.

The good news is that you don’t need any specialised software to follow these guidelines - both of these documents could have been produced with plain old Microsoft Word, or OpenOffice for that matter. By creating something that interests the eye and invites a stranger to become a reader, you will have created the very best conditions for that reader to become engrossed in your content. And all without a graphic designer in sight.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.