Business communications – professional vs. unpolished design?
May 29th 2009
Part of my job is creating templates and designing formats for business communications. I’ve been helping a colleague in Europe to develop a regional email newsletter that will be sent to several hundred employees. The purpose of the newsletter is to help employees feel more engaged, so it is a mix of articles on business topics (major initiatives, etc.) and personal topics (employee profiles, etc.). Her draft design used about 8 different colors, the layout was random and was very amateurish in appearance. I redesigned it to use just 2 alternating colors and tightened up the format so it looked more polished. She didn’t like it and wanted her rainbow of colors back. Her reasoning was “we don’t want it to look so professional.”
I have a REALLY hard time agreeing with that perspective and told her so, but I also couldn’t really articulate why I felt so strongly about it. What would you do? If you had a coworker or a customer say they didn’t want something to look so “professional”, what would you say to convince them otherwise?
To me, her approach looked sloppy, disorganized and was difficult to read. Other than telling her the blunt truth about the design, how could I have persuaded her to see that a clean, polished design is the better way to go?
May 31st, 2009 at 8:37 am
When I look at places online I want to buy from I steer clear from sites with amateur website design or cheesy graphics. I look for something professional. A professional look says the company is concerned with how it’s perceived in my opinion.
Another thing is how people perceive the artist behind the work. If you make it look unprofessional people are going to think you don’t care about them…that all you care about is the money you are getting from the work. If you are going to be connected with it in any way, you need to be responsible for it’s look. If it’s bad, you need to be the one to make it look good (like you did).
If she isn’t willing to make professional design, maybe she shouldn’t have a professional career.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:06 am
Compromise. Accept that it will not be what you would do, but strive to bring order to her chaos. Achieving a professional casual is a challenge but not entirely impossible.
Sit her down and explain that the newsletter is not so much of an expression of the person writing it as it is how the person that reads it sees it.
Not everyone, actually few, people are as creatively in tuned as she is. If she wants to get her message across then it has to be in a way that they will read it.
Multiple colors may be acceptable for an in-house info rag that is for employees and not the general public. If she is going to use colors and fonts then they should be consistent. For example Blue background with techno font is always the tech corner. Green with Times Roman is always about money. Pink with New Century Schoolbook is always the personal profile. Orange with the Comic San is the section you look to for humor.
In this manner each person reading it will be able to quickly find what they are looking for.
What is colors and fonts are used is less important than being consistent from issue to issue. Consider each these cells as a separate document with your rules of limit of colors and fonts.