Report Design GUIDE

I love writing and reading so my love of the English language features prominently in the way I approach big document and report design.

STEP 1 Initially, I’ll get a sense of the technical specs you want. That means document size, a guess at the page count or the word count and a decision on how you want the finished article to look. Do you want a creative-looking, A4-sized report in full colour that will go on to impress your stakeholders with 8 pages of data visualisation, 120 pages of corporate achievements in a fine, beautiful font and some hand-painted art? Or do you want an A5 guidebook with pencil illustrations and a hand-made, sketchbook feel? If you’re unsure, then a moodboard or two will be useful here. Remember too, that the design process is for exploring some of these ideas. Will it take time? It can yes; however, by the end of the process you will at least have a good grasp of the style that you want to work in.

STEP 2 Next, I’ll look at the information architecture. That’s the way that the information on the page fits together and the order it comes in. Ideally the writer (and maybe an editor) will have a handle on this and it will come with some sort of information architecture already in place. Usually that’s chapters or sections. Personally, I don’t use AI for my writing, but if you do, I’m happy to work with it. Just be aware that sometimes AI can make the process longer than it would normally be – it’s easier to work with 4 pages of human-written content with errors than it is to work with 48 of machine-generated writing – but I’ll always let you know if this is the case.

STEP 3 Once I can see that there’s some kind of order to work with (if there isn’t, I can find you an editor if you need one, no problem), I’ll lay it all out in my software and get a sense of the size of what the document is and what I have to work with. We can then agree a style. I usually think of style as including fonts, colours, margins and spaces, plus imagery and layouts. Once this is signed off, it’s on to the donkey work of putting the text in, removing the orphans, runts and widows, helping you catch the spelling mistakes and continuity errors and genrally getting a first draft into shape. The art is usually done around this time, too. If we’ve agreed a timescale, then of course all of this will be well-within it.

STEP 4 When we start looking at drafts, we can tweak and make adjustments. Design is a process and sometimes it’s necessary to try out things that don’t make the final cut, so this is a good opportunity to make some changes. Once the designis finalised, we cans end it off to print. I can create you a digital version too and that can be a PDF version for reading on desktop and mobile, or an eBook that can read on Kindle (or similar software). Once the print run is done, you’re ready to go!

Need to ask me some questions? You can contact me here.

written by Fran