Is your design killing your message?

Graphic designers know how to make things look cool. Unfortunately, most don't know a thing about readability.

Sad but true...

So, what's "readability?" Readability is how hard your eyes have to work to read something.

You have mere seconds to get someone's attention. So, your design needs to work for you, not against you.

Yes, we all want our materials to look nice but it's what you want your readers to do that matters. You took the time to painstakingly craft the most compelling possible message -- don't destroy it with the design.

Here's some advice that's proven to increase readability...

And let me just preemptively say -- these are not my personal opinions. What colors or fonts I happen to like is irrelevant. This is statistically proven by extensive research done by Colin Wheildon.

Ignore it at your own risk.

Serif Fonts Rule

In print, use serif fonts (Times New Roman, Garamond), not sans serif fonts (Arial, Verdana).

Sans serif fonts are 500% harder to read. That's a literal statistic, not an exaggeration.

Those little feet or flags on the ends of the letters guide our eyes and help us effortlessly recognize words by their shape.

And that's what you want reading to be... effortless. Anything else and it's your message that suffers.

Yes, it's fine to use the occasional sans serif font as an accent and for shorter items. Just proceed with caution...

As an aside (and to totally confuse you), sans serif fonts are actually easier to read online. So electronic communications -- like this e-newsletter -- usually use sans serif fonts. The reason? A computer screen has poor resolution compared to the printed page. This causes the little serif feet to blur.

Black Ink on White Paper is Gold

All primary text and major headlines should be in black ink on white paper.

Wheildon's research tells us:

For text printed black on white, "good" comprehension rates 70%.

Print that same text white on black and good comprehension falls to zero, zip, nada!

Print it on pale blue and you can get good comprehension back up to 38% -- but that's still a far cry from 70%.

The moral of the story...

Avoid colored paper, reverse type (white text set against a black or colored background), and printing over images or shaded backgrounds.

Boring? Maybe. Readable? Definitely.

Go with readable and figure out another way to work in color and shading. How? Pictures and other graphics are the most obvious way. But you can use color in your banner masthead. You can also use color for lines to divide sections of a newsletter, and for boxes around pull quotes or special offers.

You can even have some text in color but use it sparingly, not for major sections of writing.

Two Last Tips

Indent your paragraphs.

This will give whatever you write a natural outline and make it easier to read.
Indenting also creates more white space on the page -- another thing that improves readability.

Minimize your use of ALL CAPS.

Similar to how the flags on a serif font help our eyes recognize words, lowercase letters do too.
Capital letters appear as one big block of text and are much harder to decipher than words in traditional lowercase or Title Case lettering.

So take this and start having conversations with your designers about how you want them to design for you.

They might not understand the importance of these new guidelines. They may even argue with you. Refer them to Colin Wheildon's book, Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes.

And, remember -- it doesn't matter how pretty your materials are if they aren't readable.