Designing

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You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Don’t underestimate the importance of design. Good design cannot compensate for poor content, but it’s one of the key factors of successful technical communication. An attractively designed communication product motivates users to read it, much like an attractively wrapped present motivates its recipient to open it.

Readers stay longer in an attractive-looking document than they stay in an unattractive-looking one. Readers who are motivated and stay in the document longer are more likely to understand the given information. Users who understand the given information are more likely to use your product successfully.

A clear design and well-thought-out templates also motivate and help you, the author, to produce clear, user-friendly content.

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When to design

Many people, especially developers, argue that the design of a document should be the final step before you ship your document. Theoretically, this is true; practically, however, we don’t recommend this approach for a number of reasons:

If you haven’t prepared appropriate styles for paragraphs, characters, links, and tables, you will have to go through all of your texts again just to apply the formatting. If you set up your templates beforehand, you can assign the appropriate styles right away.

While writing, you don’t see what you get. If you don’t see the final result, this makes it more difficult to assume the perspective of the reader and to decide whether your text is easy to comprehend.

Writing an unformatted text is simply less motivating than writing an attractive-looking one.

Tip:
Usually, the most efficient approach is to design the template beforehand without attempting to make the design pixel perfect at this stage. Instead, aim for about 80% of the quality standard that you want to achieve. Then, start writing and iteratively improve the templates where necessary. When writing is finished, review the design and make final adjustments.

What you need to know

You don’t need to be a graphic artist to create a professional-looking, user-friendly template for a user manual or online help file.

Layout basics
Shows you the overall principles that you should follow when designing a template.

Setting the type area
Shows you how to segment the page or screen.

Choosing fonts and spacing
Shows you the basic typographic conventions that you should set up.

Recommended screen layouts
Provides examples of basic screen layouts for your inspiration.

Recommended page layouts
Provides examples of basic page layouts for your inspiration.

Recommended paragraph styles
Shows you which paragraph styles you should typically set up, and which paragraph settings are important.

Recommended character styles
Shows you which character styles you should typically prepare, and which settings are recommended here.

Recommended table styles
Provides some examples of how you can create professional-looking tables.