Planning Great Graphic Design
OfficePRO magazine,
May 2004
Answer these questions before designing your next report or newsletter
BY KAREN FRITSCHER-PORTER
Whether you’re designing a report, newsletter, or slide show, you’ll work more quickly and efficiently if you stop to think first. Before you make a key-stroke, do some preliminary work by asking yourself or your boss some questions:
1.Who is the target audience? The words you include in a piece and its design hinge on who’s on the receiving end of the newsletter, report, or invitation. For instance, a formal, upscale audience may expect an invitation to a fund-raising social to appear elegant and sound rich, whereas an audience of elementary-school-age pet lovers would rather see photos of dogs on a placemat versus a headshot of your company CEO in a slick brochure.
“If you’re sending the piece to certain customers in your database, it needs to be tailored to them so that they respond,” explains Sue Bonzell, owner of Sue Bonzell Design in Forestville, California. “If it’s something that’s not appropriate to them or they don’t get anything out of it, then you’re wasting your time. They will throw it away.”
2.What do you hope to achieve with this piece? “If you start with questions like ‘Who is your target audience?’ or ‘What do you hope to achieve with this piece?’ the person who’s giving you the project often will be forced to answer questions that he’s never even considered,” suggests Bryan Peterson, owner of graphic design firm Peterson & Company in Dallas. “And sometimes it’s a journey of self-discovery because he discovers ‘We don’t even need this’ or ‘This is the wrong vehicle we’re using.’ The boss may have seen it done somewhere else or she just had this idea of making a flyer but it really doesn’t make a lot of sense. So by asking, you’re forcing her to think about it.”
In the end, your boss may decide that internal invitation to the company picnic perhaps should just be in the form of a one-paragraph company-wide e-mail versus a four-color flyer with cute graphics mailed to each employee’s home, thus cut-ting staff time to create the piece and saving budget dollars that would have been spent on supplies, services, and postage.
Bonzell agrees that discussing the goal of the project with your boss can change the preconceived piece. “It may be that you need to send a brochure that tells more. Or maybe you shouldn’t be doing a direct-mail piece, but instead you should be doing an ad. Sometimes just having that conversation about ‘What do you want to see come out of this?’ can change the piece and give you more direction.”
3. Should you be doing the design in-house or hiring professional graphic designers and/or printers? “The ultimate purpose of a piece, whatever it is that you’re creating, is really what’s going to drive both how it’s designed and who does it in a sense,” says graphic designer Chris Clark of Cave Dog Studio in Salem, Massachusetts. “Is it a very simple kind of casual invitation going to maybe 10 people? Or is it something that is more formal that has to be carefully structured in its language and display? Is the audience a bunch of high-powered people who expect to get classy-looking stuff? Is it upscale? Or is it just a casual communication or an in-house newsletter? Do you need to push the design just a bit further beyond [the capabilities of] your desktop design software and print-ing it on your laser printer [versus using a print shop’s offset printing equipment]?
“A lot of stuff can be done in-house, even easily by someone with limited knowledge about design and layout and so forth,” Clark continues. “But depending on where those answers lead you, it may be something you shouldn’t consider doing in-house.” This decision may depend on your company’s size, company perception, or expectations by outsiders including your target market and your company’s finances and resources.
4. What single point are you most trying to convey to your audience? “Get it down to the simple message and refine it,” advises Peterson, who says the natural tendency often is to overload a piece with visual and verbal items to the point where it’s actually incomprehensible. “If you were to say three submessages to your defined audience, what would they be?” he asks.
“If you’re talking about a report where that information absolutely has to be in there, you’re kind of stuck,” adds Bonzell. “But when doing advertising or direct mail, less is more. Ask, ‘If I have to, can I cut some and what can I cut?’”
A simplistic approach to your design and message versus a complex one can mean the difference between reaching your audience and offending them. “You want an uncluttered approach because you don’t want to confuse whoever is on the receiving end of whatever it is you’re doing, whether it’s a brochure, a business card, or a logo,” adds Kathleen Roche, a senior designer with retail and catalog agency Ambrosi in Chicago. “You don’t want them to misinterpret your most important messages because if they misinterpret them, then you have lost a customer or you’ve confused someone and they go elsewhere.”
5. What questions would arise if I were the recipient of this piece? “Put yourself in the position of someone who is going to receive this communication and who wants these questions answered, such as ‘Why am I receiving this communication?’” says Peterson. The answer to this question may be that you’ve identified the target and this person is part of that target, suggests Peterson. “And if I am a part of that target audience, then why is this important for me? And what makes you different? Why is this message differ-ent from what I’m getting from other people? And what do you sell that I can only get from you or that is enhanced by your operation, and so forth.”
Robert Hartman of Robert Hartman Graphic Design in Newark, New Jersey, agrees that you should try to identify with your recipient. “I try to imagine myself as the reader all the time, especially when I’m doing the first page of a newsletter. What’s going to make me open this? If you can get readers to open your piece, then you’ve done a lot of your job.”
6. What’s your verbal strategy? “Now you take the information you just gathered and organize it into some sort of a strategy,” Peterson says. “This step is strategic thinking. It’s where you say, ‘Well, if this is what we’re trying to communicate, this is the key message, these are the submessages, if this is our audience, and this is what makes us different, now how can we immediately communicate that? The verbal strategy relies on the skill of the person, the administrative assistant [in this case], to come up with a way of saying this.”
Similar to Clark’s advice, Peterson suggests that at this point, you have to decide if it’s a simple design project that doesn’t merit spending excessive funds for outside design assistance or a more complex one best handled by a professional. “If you really think this is some-thing that’s critical to the company that needs to be said in just the right way and needs to have a strategy that’s going to hit the right buttons of the right people, then you really want to spend the money [for professional assistance],” Peterson says.
7. What’s your visual interpretation of your verbal strategy? “A big mistake designers make is they don’t have a ver-bal message, but they dress it up with clever looking graphics,” says Peterson. Design should complement a concise and purposed verbal message.
Peterson suggests the design phase of planning and creating graphic design may be difficult for some people. An administrative assistant who is not also a skilled graphic designer will have to use her best sense of design skills, advises Peterson. “You’re better off keeping the design simple,” he says. “The best design includes only those elements that are critical to communicating the message. Take out anything extraneous. Keep the design as clean as possible. A design firm makes sure always that what we’re presenting is just the very bare necessity to communicate the message. That can still be very complex because it might be a complex design but even still it’s honed down to the final elements.”
8. How will you execute the delivery of your design? Peterson interprets the delivery stage as “making the right selections,” such as hiring the right illustrator or photographer, picking the right stock photography, and using the right printer or press if you’re outsourcing the job. “Delivery is about execution of the design to where you actually make good decisions,” explains Peterson. “It’s about ‘OK, now I’m going to build the design.’”
When appropriate, Hartman makes recommendations to his clients for various illustrators or photographers. “I try to match these people to the product,” he explains. “I look at their skills, if it’s the right kind of fit, and also the budget. I can’t suggest someone that is really good but that the client couldn’t afford.” An administrative person should consider these issues, too, before outsourcing assignments.
9. What are the logistical parameters regarding the project? Logistical parameters differ from the conceptual and thematic or informational questions suggested already. Logistics are imperative to any graphic design project and such questions should be asked up front, particularly if you’re planning to get quotes from print shops or other outside contractors. You need to gather the following essential information about the project:
● Timeframe
● Budget
● Print quantity and how you plan to print it (offset printer, in-house laser printer, etc.)
● Color or black/white
● Space available for content
● Original size and finished size
You also need to know whether you will have to incorporate a logo, if there are color preferences or restrictions, whether the printer can match your colors and fonts, any paper preferences, and specific photos or graphics that must be included. In addition, determine whether you have free reign with the design or you must follow strict criteria. Ask if your boss has a sample of a similar design or piece. Perhaps your boss can scribble his or her initial vision on a piece of paper.
“Final printing does determine a lot of your costs,” says Roche, who suggests you know such logistics as paper quality and color usage. It may be that your project budget, another logistic, strongly affects your paper and color options.
“How things are printed is often deter-mined by the design,” adds Clark. “There is a little bit of a chicken-and-egg thing going on. If you want something that is printed in color in-house and you don’t have the ability to print in color, that sort of limits you and you end up going out of house for that. You have to lay out that groundwork before you get going on the project or before you decide who is going to actually do it.”
Once you’ve finished the planning stage by asking and answering these suggested questions, and if you’ve decided to continue as the primary graphic designer of the piece, you’re ready to tackle that blank screen. That brings up a whole barrel of new design questions—ones that might have you screaming for assistance from the nearest professional graphic designer or even ones that might lead you down a whole new career path if you find graphic design appealing.
Karen Fritscher-Porter is a freelance writer in Bloomingdale, GA.