Not everyone is a graphic designer, but everyone deserves to produce beautiful, easily readable documents. And design work doesn’t need to be stressful or confusing - keeping just a few basics in mind is all it takes to ensure a quality product. Here are a few tips to make your everyday work more visually attractive and readable using almost any editing program without a huge investment of your time and resources.

1. Break up large sections of text with photos, shapes or horizontal lines

Documents with a lot of content in the form of text can be difficult to read so help your audience by breaking text using whitespace, photos, a line break or a rectangle block of color.

2. Vary fonts to break up content

An easy way to class up any document is to use a consistent set of fonts to distinguish headings from subheadings from body content. The key here is to limit your fonts to 2 or 3 separate and clearly readable fonts or choose one font and vary it by capitalizing headings, italicizing subheadings and using the unbolded version for your body text.

3. Keep It Simple

When in doubt, whitespace is usually your friend. Whitespace (also known as negative space) is the empty space you leave that can make your design look clean, simple and even elegant. Whitespace frees up your readers eyes to focus on your content rather than distracting them with more words and visual elements. In the world of design, sometimes less is more.

Using these three tips (and what you already have in your personal design toolkit!) you can easily create simple, easy to read documents to print and share with your colleagues and clients. Need more help? Contact us and get started with one of our graphic designers!