When and Where to Use Graphics in a Page-limited Document

With travel this week, I've decided to keep this blog short and to the point (as some of your documents need to be).

When should you use a graphic when space is limited?
Here are three reasons to choose a visual representation in a page-limited proposal or marketing document:

1. Your solution is complex. Often a graphic can communicate complex concepts more succinctly than text alone. Consider network diagrams, quantitative charts, dashboard graphics, Gantt charts, organizational charts, and process diagrams. All communicate complex information that is easily digested.
2. You want to ensure your information stands out. Good graphics pull our eyes to them because, to simplify the explanation, they look different than the text around them. Visuals communicate faster than text because text is decoded linearly and graphics are absorbed all at once. Graphics are instantly stored in long-term memory whereas text must go through short-term memory before they are stored in long-term memory.
3. You want to quickly communicate the professionalism and commitment to the project. Graphics show you care and speak to the quality of the service/product your company provides.

Where should you place graphics in a page-limited document?
Anywhere they are needed. The golden rule is a graphic per page, but I have found it unrealistic to shoehorn a graphic onto every page despite tight budgets and page limitations. Place your graphic as close as possible to the associated text for better clarification.

Space Too Tight? Use These 7 Tips to Slim Down Your Graphics

Sometimes no matter how much we try to convince our clients that less is more, we find ourselves shoving oversized content into an undersized space. Maybe your client wants to save money by only printing a two-page brochure, even though they have four pages of information. Maybe they could only afford a 1/4-page ad with enough text and graphics to fill a half-page space. Or maybe you are working on graphics for a page-restricted RFP and are over by several pages. If you are suffering from bloated content, then here are my 7 tips to trim down graphics and make them fit in tight spaces:

1. Exclude extraneous words and descriptors. Change “Our Systematic, Quality Evaluation Process” to “Evaluation Process.”
2. Use known acronyms. For example, “quality control” becomes “QC.”
3. Use a sans serif, narrow font like Arial Narrow for graphics, tables, and callouts. (If your document does not embed the font, make sure the end user has the font.) Sans serif fonts are cleaner looking and easier to read for short chunks of text and small sizes. Narrow fonts shorten the width of each character, which allows more content in the same space.
4. Decrease line spacing where possible. For page-limited proposals, I recommend using a .85 multiple line spacing in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and the same line spacing as font size in Adobe products (for example, 10-point line spacing for a 10-point font).
5. Use short arrowheads.
   
6. Remove all unused space.
   
   
7. Delete extraneous imagery. If an image quickly communicates information, keep it. If, however, the image merely supports the information, delete it.
   
   

O' Caption, My Caption

To use a caption or not to use a caption with a graphic?

That is a question posed to me during the start of many projects—especially proposals.

I highly recommend using captions with your graphics. I am referring to the “title” of your graphic—also called a caption. This article does not address numbering graphics or referencing specific RFP requirements for proposals. (Of course, you want to make it easy for the evaluator to find and link your graphic to an RFP requirement, so why wouldn’t you do this?)

Good captions accomplish two things:

1. Quickly and clearly share your graphic’s primary message.
2. Give the reader a reason to care about your graphic.

If your goal is to influence or persuade your audience, your caption should be one sentence long and include a “benefit” and a “how” (often the solution). Place the “benefit” before the “how” to give the reader a reason to care about your solution. Whenever possible, include quantitative data to further validate your assertions. Professionals in almost every industry have a visceral, gut reaction to quantitative data, because what is measured is improved. Measuring or quantification tells the reader that your solution is tested, process-driven, repeatable, and lowers risk. The following is an example of a good caption.

If your goal is to clarify or explain (persuasion is not needed), your caption should summarize the content of your graphic. For example, “Company X’s organization.” Marketing materials (including proposals) are intended to influence, motivate, and persuade, and I always include a benefit: “To ensure an easy transition, Company X’s organization includes key personnel with 20 years of iFind software experience.”

To be successful, your graphic must be consistent with your caption. To confirm that your graphic is synonymous with your caption, remove the caption and ask others what conclusion they reach after reviewing the visual. If it is similar to your written caption, you have a successful caption. If not, modify your graphic or rewrite your caption based on your goal.

Sadly, most graphics do not communicate what the caption states. The solution is to write your caption first and then create the graphic based on the idea stated in your caption.

I use slightly different approaches for graphics in printed materials versus shown in a presentation:

Written Proposals

1. Placement: Captions are shown beneath your graphic. It is the accepted convention and therefore expected. Your goal is to make it easy for the reader/evaluator to find what they are looking for.
2. Style: The style should be different than the body text, so the reader knows it is associated with the graphic and not the surrounding body text. (You can certainly get away with a different color or size if it follows your template and/or RFP requirements.)
3. Government vs. Commercial: The approach I recommend for Government proposals is not the approach I recommend for commercial props. Government proposals tend to require condensed line spacing (leading—the space between lines of text) whereas commercial proposals include more white space and can be a smaller point size.

Oral Proposals

1. Placement: The caption should consistently appear at the bottom of your slides. Think of it as you “take away.” It is the final word or conclusion of the slide.
2. Style: The caption is large enough and distinct enough to be readable and consistently recognized as the “take away.” I place my captions in stylized boxes no smaller than 14-point type (usually 20 point).
3. Government vs. Commercial: For commercial proposals that do not have strict RFP stipulated outlines, I use an edited, shorter version of the caption as the title. I do so because the purpose of a good slide title is to make the audience care about the content of the slide. For Government proposals, place the caption at the bottom of the slide (see rule #1).

Follow these rules and match your caption to your graphic to ensure clear, concise, compelling communication and watch your success rate rise.

Spark a Fire! Five Tips to Grab and Hold Your Audience’s Attention

Yaaaawn.

Even the best presentations lose your attention. Why? Because your brain is fast. Your mind drifts once you decide the information presented is unimportant or uninteresting; therefore, it is unnecessary to pay attention. You need to be engaged to stay focused. Your audience is exactly the same. The following are five techniques to capture and hold your audience’s attention throughout your presentation.

1. Surprise. Say, show or do something that is shocking or unexpected. It can be as simple as a loud noise (a clap or a few notes of music) or an odd picture added to your slide deck. The purpose is to reengage the audience’s brain. Being unpredictable or incongruent snaps the mind to attention. For example, I attended a presentation where the hidden presenter “typed” sentences on the screen instead of speaking. The audience was dead silent and engaged the entire time.
2. Cognitive Dissonance. Keep your audience guessing. Hold their brains off balance by feeding bits of information as opposed to revealing your point early. Build a graphic slide by slide as if assembling a puzzle. Slowly reveal parts of your graphic, briefly speak to each part and build your graphic so your point is revealed in the end.
3. Story. Tell an interesting story that complements your presentation. Remember the saying, “Facts tell and stories sell.” Stories hook audiences from the start. Share a unique story to hold their attention but be sure the story ties into your presentation.
4. Involve. Ask your audience to participate. Play a game, pose a question, solve a puzzle, or perform an exercise. For example, avoid telling your audience everything. Let them learn through trial and error. Give your group an exercise and ask what worked and what did not.
5. Senses. The more senses (hearing, sight, taste, smell, and touch) you engage, the stronger the interest. For example, play sad music, show images of neglected animals and give your audience a cuddly puppy toy to pet while telling a moving story about animal rescue.

Combine these techniques for a winning presentation. During my graphic training sessions, I show the symbol on the right (allegedly created for the United States Department of Homeland Defense for use during disasters) and ask, “What does this mean?”

By doing so, I use two of the techniques listed above to capture my audience’s attention (“Cognitive Dissonance” and “Involve”).

Know your audience. If your audience feels manipulated and your approach held little relevance to the topic, you will lose their attention—and trust.

In the end, your goal is to affect your audience emotionally. Use these five techniques to spark a fire within your audience. Give them a reason care. Get them excited or concerned to engage their hearts and minds during and after your presentation.

The Noun Project

On Twitter recently, I saw a link for The Noun Project and immediately knew I needed to share this link with my readers. I had just interviewed Nigel Holmes where he discussed symbols/icons and keeping graphics simple. He also mentioned social scientist Otto Neurath and artist Gerd Arntz, who had collected every single icon they had made in three-ring binders. Working together, they became pioneers of modern-day visual language. The Noun Project seems to be taking their work and going a step further. This site not only collects symbols but allows you to download and use these symbols for free.

Yes, that's right FREE.

(However, I highly recommend leaving a donation to help maintain and grow this important project.)

Check out the icons below. Notice the simple lines and shapes used to visually communicate these various concepts.


As these icons prove, you don't always need complex visuals to communicate complex ideas. In fact, Edward (the designer behind the project) had been creating simple sketches of ordinary objects when he became "fascinated with their complexity and mechanics." Then, while working for an architecture firm and needing to do presentations, he became frustrated with the lack of free resources for high-quality symbols/icons. He toyed with the idea of "collecting every single noun-symbol" and placing it on a website for the public to download. Years later, Edward (along with support from his wife and an old friend) started The Noun Project with the goal to "share an international visual language." People from around the world are welcome to upload their "noun-symbols" for inclusion on this site (subject to approval).

What an amazing and inspiring concept. I urge you to go to this site and bookmark it now. Whenever you need inspiration for how to communicate a concept; a simple way to show a person, place, thing, or idea; or icons for your next job check out The Noun Project.

And make sure to leave a donation—or buy a t-shirt. You can create some very interesting—and visually communicative—t-shirts from their library of icons.

Very cool!

Shape Friends=Math Friends

A couple months ago, a friend's 5-year-old niece won McGraw-Hill's "What Math Means to Me" contest. Her artwork will be shown in upcoming McGraw-Hill My Math student materials (print and online) as well as in the Museum of Math in New York City.

Quite an accomplishment for a kindergarten student!

For the contest, students had to draw original works of art that told a story of what math meant to them along with a short narrative with the same theme. My young associate's winning piece (shown here) told the story of learning shapes in math and "equated" it with making friends at the same time. See the piece above and also check out the website below:

Shape Friends=Math Friends

Like the image of the Hand Turkey from our previous post, this student took something simple (triangles, rectangles, squares, etc.) and transformed those shapes into a story of friendship blossoming out of learning math. Many times it takes a child to find a way to communicate a complex idea in a simple way. However, I think we all can do this—and I think we all should do this. Look at the simple shapes of objects, which you use everyday for work. What ideas can be conveyed by using a pencil shape? What about the rectangular shapes of a computer monitor or laptop? Could you use any of the objects pertaining to your work to create a graphic that communicates your company's message or sells you ideas?

Not only did she draw a great picture, she also told a story. This part was given weight during final judging. Audiences connect more to your vision if presented with a story. Combine an image of your product with a short paragraph speaking about someone benefiting from using your product. Maybe you show a silhouette of your pencil used for drawing plans with a story about how the pencil helps to shape your ideas.

I challenge you to take time in your day to think with the freedom and creativity of a child. You'll be surprised at what you create.

5 Questions with Nigel Holmes

With his round blue spectacles and blue outfits, Nigel Holmes is a brand unto himself. I first met him at the Presentation Summit in 2010, though I've been a fan of (and inspired by) his graphics for many years. His work has distilled complex ideas into memorable, easy-to-understand graphics for periodicals such as Time magazine (where he worked as the graphics director), National Geographic, and The New York Times. He is an author of several books including Wordless Diagrams, Nigel Holmes on Information Design, and a book for children, Pinhole and the Adventure to the Jungle. Currently, he is principal of Explanation Graphics, a graphic design firm located outside of New York City, where he creates graphics, illustrations and animations for advertising, books, corporate identity, logos, and websites. We were honored and excited when he agreed to answer our 5 questions for our blog. For interesting (and effective) ways to speak visually, Nigel Holmes is the man with the graphic vision.

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1. During your keynote at the Presentation Summit, you showed a lovely picture your granddaughter had drawn (quite the budding talent!). I then wondered about your childhood. Did you have a passion for drawing and diagrams as a child? How and when did your interest begin?
   
   I have some drawings from when I was about 7. Not wonderful. But when my father died I found an envelope of my stuff he had kept over a very long period: drawings from when I was about 12, and also cuttings from magazines I had worked for in England and later from Time magazine. It was a touching surprise to find them. I never knew he saw Time magazine in England—it wasn't a regular in our home. Some of those early bits and pieces he had kept were kind of diagram-like, I suppose. It was only when I was at the Royal College of Art in London that my real interest in explaining things began. For a couple of summers there, I interned with Brian Haynes at the Sunday Times of London, and he pointed out that although I was studying illustration at college, I wasn't a very good illustrator ... but for some reason he hired me. (Perhaps he liked the fact that I had been the art director of the college magazine, Ark, as he had been in his own time at the Royal College.) I learned more about graphic design and explanatory journalism in those two short internships than in my six years at art school. Brian was busy breaking down the walls between the art department and the so-called editorial department (people who wrote stuff). It was a real introduction to the necessary marriage between art and words; areas that were traditionally partitioned off from each other, with the art department reduced to merely making a page look nice—mere decorators. The intense weekly schedule, and real deadlines at the Sunday Times excited me. Brian was combining words and maps and diagrams and illustrations and photos and old engravings and bits of enlarged typography in an effort to tell stories in the most compelling ways. When he left the Times, I followed him as a freelance contributor to other magazines, doing diagrams about Wimbledon, the London docks and Buckingham Palace. I did use illustration in these jobs, but the illustration wasn't the point; clear explanation of particular aspects of the subject was. This was 1966.
   
   
2. In your book Wordless Diagrams, you use simple diagrams to show various acts from everyday to slightly bizarre, such as how to change a tire to how to pierce a tongue. You show how graphics are a “visual alphabet” where a reader doesn’t need to know a spoken language to understand the steps you are relating to them. How do you begin the process of distilling complex actions and ideas into simple visuals as in your book?
   
   The idea of a visual language that I have tried to emulate comes from the work of Otto Neurath. Together with artist Gerd Arntz, Neurath (himself a social scientist not a designer) produced charts in the 1930s and 40s using what they called a visual "helping language." They never intended their work to be completely wordless (and thus internationally understood), but regarded the visualization of statistics as a very important way to persuade people to look and be interested in subjects that they may not have been interested in if they'd just been shown a table of numbers. Over the years, I have drawn many little parts of things—cars, planes, boats, animals, trees, food, buildings—and men, women and children running, walking, digging, soldiering, playing the trumpet, laughing, or sleeping. At the end of each job, I dissect the chart or diagram, whatever it is I've been working on, and put the separate parts into folders labeled "people," "animals," "buildings," etc. They are my own vocabulary, and I use them again and again. Perhaps one day in the distant future, some graphic historian-nerd might analyze my work and show where the same little icons of people or houses have popped up in different, unrelated jobs! Neurath and Arntz actually kept huge three-ring binders containing prints of every single little icon they made, glued in neatly, all categorized. You can see them in an archive in Rotterdam. Some parts of complex actions are best shown in pictures, some are best described in words. I break down the actions to be explained into likely pictures and just work through it until I think it's accurately explained. There's no real secret, or formula. Some things that I want to explain can be served with a single picture and an attendant commentary (usually in the form of "step 1," "step 2," etc.); others are more like a comic strip. It does depend on the context (where it will appear), too. I can take more liberties with certain magazines, or my own books, than I can with The New York Times or National Geographic.
   
   
3. In a pamphlet you gave out to the attendees at the Presentation Summit, you wrote, “Today the best information graphics are a happy marriage of words and pictures, with each partner playing the role that they are good at, and holding back when the other has more to offer.” This is a concept we teach in our graphics training and many times are asked how do you know when to give the words more weight over the graphic and vice versa. Can you provide any pointers or is it something that you know instinctively having studied and worked with design for many years?
   
   I think I may have answered most of this in your question 2. But I would add that one should never be afraid to suggest that the best solution to an assignment might be all text rather than what was proposed as a graphic by an art director or editor.
   
   
4. What is the number one mistake you find graphic designers make? How can they avoid this mistake?
   
   Including too much information. I make this mistake often myself. It's the natural result of finding out lots of interesting information while researching a subject, and being loathe to edit it out. But editing is one of the most important things in information graphics. By editing I mean both making sure any text is grammatical and properly spelled, of course, but more importantly, editing out anything that's not necessary to the efficient telling of the story. The beauty of the computer is that you can save something you've done, and look at a copy of it to see what can be left out. That applies to content, color, and extraneous decoration ... anything that's getting in the way of the message. I find that an interesting way to start every job is by limiting myself to black and white, or perhaps black, white and one color. Then adding color if/when it becomes actually necessary.
   
   
5. What one tip would you give our readers to help them improve their visual communications?
   
   Simplicity.