Graphics & Design

1. Body text (the major part of your document) usually should be between 10 and 12 point. For printing to a 300 dpi printer, 11 point works the best. Use the same typeface, type size, and leading (line-spacing) for all your body copy.
2. Use enough leading. The leading size should always be at least one or two points bigger than the type size. This is what automatic line spacing will do for you. If you use less, the text will become cramped.
3. Keep your lines of text over 30 characters and under 70 characters in length.
4. Paragraph beginnings should be clear. Use either block style or indent for paragraphs. Never use both. Don't use neither, either.
5. You should only use one space after a period, not two.
6. Don't justify lines unless you have to. If you have to use justification, use hyphenation as well.
7. Don't underline anything, especially not headlines or subheads. These lines would separate them from the text with which they belong.
8. Use italics instead of underlines.
9. Long blocks of text ought not be set in italics, bold, or all caps. All three of these effects make the text much harder to read.
10. Leave more space above headlines and subheads than below. Avoid setting them in all caps. Use subheads to help readers find what they are looking for.

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According to Robin Williams, in The Non-Designer's Web Book, "Color can create moods, add emphasis, attract attention, organize information, and entertain the viewer. It can be subtle, obnoxious, muted, bright, minimal, overdone, harmonious, distracting, beautiful, or ugly. It can scream or whisper, repel or seduce."  When properly-used, color can make a document easier to read. It can also increase readership (just ask the publishers of USA Today). Color tends to evoke certain emotions in readers. It is wise to consider what effect a color will have on your reader prior to using it in your document.

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A common mistake made by new document/presentation designers is overloading their project with clipart. The ease of placing clipart into projects and the plethora of clipart images available has led to the over use of decorative images. Here are a few things to consider when adding images to your project:

• Images should be used to help convey the message and to add interest to the page.
• The best images are ones that help the reader understand the message, not ones placed on the page for decoration.
• Using a decorative image that is unrelated to the message may weaken the message.
• Don’t let the fun of being creative take away from the main focus of communicating effectively.
• The style of the image must be relevant to the subject of the project. (a.e.; don’t use a cartoon to illustrate a project about a natural disaster). The style influences the way a reader gets involved with the project.
• First decide were your document needs an illustration for support, and then choose the image and style that will best support your project message.

This subject was suggested by Sue Petryk. Thanks Sue!

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All caps is a feature that inexperienced designers often use. The use of all caps was common practice back in the old typewriting days--If you wanted to make some text stand out, capitalizing all the letters was about the only way you could do it. Nowadays with all the font choices we have available it is no longer necessary to use all caps to make text stand out. Therefore this is a habit I’d encourage you to break.

This image demonstrates some of the reasons you should consider  breaking the ALL CAPS Habit:

• The forms (shape) of capital letters are distinctly different from the forms of lowercase letters. So all caps versus lowercase is a way to contrast type. Contrast is a wonderful design tool.
• Not only are each individual capital letterforms different from its lowercase form, the form of the entire all-cap word is also different. This is what makes all caps so difficult to read. Readers not only recognize words by their letters, but also by the form (shape) of the entire word. Words that are set in capital letters have a similar rectangular form. We are forced to read the words letter by letter.
• When type is set in all caps it is considerably longer than the same words set in lowercase. See Image Above: Note the top example, which is set in all caps, must be 8 points smaller in order to fit into the box.
• You can fit more, heavier, or larger text into your space using lowercase characters rather than all caps.
• Type that falls into the script category is virtually impossible to read in all caps.

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Using Screen Shots to Make More Readable Documents

As software becomes increasingly graphical, describing what you should see on the screen is much clearer with a picture screen shot. The screen shot can then go into a document with the explanation of how students are supposed to use the program. The image to the right is one that was created by taking a screen shot as I was creating this page.

Getting ready: Find something you need to take a picture of, often the opening menu of a program. If possible, position the window so that the top of what you want to 'shoot' is at the top left corner of the computer screen. Move the mouse until the pointer is appropriately placed either off the window entirely or pointing to what the student needs to click on.

Take the screen shot: Hold Alt and press Print Screen (PrtScr). This saves a copy of the screen to the computer's memory. Since the picture is in memory, you need to immediately paste it into a document. You can only take one screen shot at a time before pasting it into another document.

Cleaning up the picture: You may need to cut some of the screen shot to focus in on just what you want or to size it to fit. In that case, you need to copy your screen shot into a graphics program, such as Paint, PaintShop, Corel Draw, etc.

Putting it into a document: You can create the text first, then paste the screen shot into the appropriate place, or paste the screen shot first and add text later. One way to get better control of the location of graphics in Word is to use the tables option. Create a table with the appropriate number of columns two if you just want one column of text with your graphic, and three if you want text of both sides of your graphic. Put the picture into one "cell" of the table, then add your text to the other cell(s). Adjust the size of each cell to suit. To resize the picture within many programs, click on the picture, then see if there are little boxes at the edge. These are the "handles" that you can pull or push to change the picture's size.

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