Design tricks of the trade

Design techniques will help your readers navigate your association publication and make reading a more enjoyable experience.

Pull-out quotes
Pull-out quotes help to break up a page full of text so that it doesn’t appear like hard work for the reader. In that crucial half a second when the reader decides whether to engage with the story or turn the page, a pull-out quote will help to draw them in.

Break-out boxes
Break-out boxes help to hold a reader’s attention. These days, readers don’t usually like to read a long article from beginning to end. If the story contains one or more break-out boxes of summary information, a reader can jump in and out of the main story. They feel that they are in control of what they are reading and when. In this way, a reader can easily read every word of an article – even if it runs over five or six pages – without it feeling like hard work.

Let the picture tell the story
We’ve all heard the expression “A picture tells a thousand words”, but sometimes it can be hard to trust a picture to do so. This can be especially true for subjects that are perceived as being more intellectual and requiring more words to explain the issue. The best publications trust the pictures to tell the story; sometimes less is more and a picture can have a strong impact on the reader. Time magazine is a well-known example of an intellectual magazine that makes good use of images. And breaking up the text with images can greatly enhance the reader experience – it gives readers a chance to pause and enjoy the moment.

Think outside the square
Your school English teacher was wrong – not all stories have a beginning, middle and end. Sometimes a clever design can tell a story better than the way it appeared in the Word document where you first wrote it. Don’t be limited by the standard format of an article that runs in columns down a page. Can you illustrate a concept through a diagram or clever use of images and captions? Be creative, think visually, and remember that some readers are kinesthetic and learn best by ‘doing’ and not just reading.