Document Design

Document design is a broad term that encompasses many diverse projects. At its core principles, it is simply the application of design aesthetics (in all their subjectivity) to written documents. In practice, it is an endeavor that runs the gamut from an informational or promotional flier to a detailed investment prospectus for a Fortune 500 company.

An appropriate goal of document design is to convey information in a meaningful, insightful, intuitive, and efficient way. However, those criteria can take many forms and these forms should be managed based on an understanding of the content, medium, budget, and intended audience.


It is crucial for the designer to be able to balance the relationships between multiple bodies of text, images, and graphs. Today, however, this has even expanded—in digital document design—to include and incorporate advanced infrastructure: buttons, page transitions, animations, movies and sound. A document that was once a static, two-dimensional representation must now also be envisioned in a fluid, dynamic setting.

There is a mistake to be made in considering document design to be a form of graphic design. While the two certainly share some of the same ideals and aesthetics, they are cousins, not siblings. The ultimate goal of document design should be to communicate. However, that communications should not (in my opinion, at least) the kinds of artistic challenges to the audience that graphic design can or does. Graphic design is art; document design is communication. This is not to imply that graphic design cannot communicate, or that document design cannot be artful. Instead, I simply feel that there exists a defining line between the two that should govern the approach to the given project.

In the end, reader needs must govern the design. The layout should be pleasing to the eyes and not cause too much “noise” on the page. Text should be of an appropriate column width (three “eye-stops” is considered the most pleasing and least fatiguing). Appropriate design aesthetics should be applied to any and all text in such a way to make the striking things striking—headlines, pull quotes, etc.—while allowing bodies of text to maintain readability. Images should work with the text, not challenge it for attention, and should be placed in such a way that allows appropriate context for any text that references these images. Page transitions should be planned and deliberate, not a happenstance occurrence of text flow. Careful attention need be paid to the appearance, place, and relationship of every letter, every word, every paragraph—and all the other elements that accompany them.

Essentially, the role of the designer should be to maintain invisibility. A well-designed document should not, to the casual reader, direct attention to the design. The design of the document should act as the speaker on a stereo: it doesn’t compose the music, it doesn’t write the lyrics, but it serves, instead, to act as the channel through which the ideas and melody can travel from performance to audience.

--Andrew Wicker