Layout basics

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When setting up a template, two things are equally important:

The template must be user-friendly. It must make finding information easy, and it must make reading easy.

The template must be writer-friendly. It must be easy and efficient to use, and it must automate formatting as much as possible.

Don’t trade in one for the other.

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Things that make a template user-friendly

A user-friendly template:

looks appealing, professional, and trustworthy

makes it easy to skim a document for specific information

makes it easy to decide what information is important and what information is less important

makes reading easy and doesn’t distract the reader

Things that make a template writer-friendly

A writer-friendly template:

provides only a manageable number of styles

uses a well-thought-out convention for style names so that writers can easily remember style names

provides keyboard shortcuts to efficiently assign formats

provides styles that minimize the need to manually tweak line breaks and page breaks

provides styles that can be changed later without having to revise the whole document

Important: Don’t underestimate the importance of an efficient template. Typically, user assistance needs to be updated frequently—in particular, software user assistance. Each template inefficiency will multiply with the number of updates you make. If your document is translated into foreign languages, inefficiencies will also multiply with the number of translations.

Key principles


Setting the type area

Choosing fonts and spacing