Credible business communicators use a combination of text and visual elements and techniques to convey messages, influence perceptions, and engage the audience.

Whether you are designing documents or slide presentations, applying principles of visual rhetoric—communicating by arranging visual elements such as images, typography, and texts—will keep your audience engaged.

You don’t need to be a graphic designer to succeed. Apply key principles to create visually appealing and professionally designed materials that leave a lasting impression on your audience as you deliver reports.

And with the advantage of artificial intelligence design tools incorporated into basic word processing and slide design software, designing professional deliverables is no longer a daunting task.

Design Principles

5 Graphic Design Principles

CONTRAST

Use Color, Texture, Shape, and Size

Variation makes elements stand out. In a layout, apply contrast to create a hierarchy between                                     font sizes. Use light text on dark backgrounds and dark text on light backgrounds.

ALIGNMENT

Align Elements on Pages and Slides

Line up graphics and text in relation to the various edges of the design canvas.

Alignment creates visual connections and visible hierarchies.

REPETITION

Repeat Elements on Pages and Slides

Reuse colors, patterns, fonts, images, lines, and textures to create continuity.

BALANCE

Offset Graphical Weight

Use symmetry to balance space, text objects, and colors diagonally, horizontally, vertically, or foreground vs background.

SPACING

Strategically Create Empty Space

Separate or connect elements. Adding space emphasizes the difference between elements. Removing space emphasizes relationships.

AI Assistance in Design

You may feel like a design novice who has no idea how to create a report, or infographic that looks professional. Lucky for you, artificial intelligence tools—even though they are still in their infancy—are growing quickly. Although most design tools are in their alpha or beta versions, you can find artificial intelligence in most of the design tools you use, making designing easier and less time-consuming.

Check out the artificial intelligence in slide design sites like beautiful.ai, which gives free premium access with a university email; Canva, which has an artificial intelligence photo editor; Google Slides, which has a Help Me Visualize prompt; Microsoft Office, which is launching its CoPilot suite that adds AI to all MS Office tools, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; and DALL·E2, an OpenAI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.

Color Theory

Your company or organization will most likely have its own style guide with an established color palette. Here, for example, is the Harvard Business School’s style guide. In the meantime, you’ll find this brief introduction to color theory useful.

Using a small range of consistent colors is key to good design. Some people are great at picking color palettes, others . . . not so much. Access the expertise of great designers by using one of these sites to create a color palette for a project you’re working on:

Adobe Color CC, Colors

Text Design Principles

Font Selection and Size

When choosing your font, you want to consider your target audience and the document's purpose. Is your document formal or informal? What tone and brand do you want to convey? Additionally, you should prioritize readability, legibility, contrast, and harmony in creating a visual aesthetic.

Generally, a size of 10-12 points is recommended for printed materials. Digital content benefits from slightly larger sizes (around 12-14 points) due to varying sizes and resolutions. Take a look at the table below to determine which font you should use for your document.

For more examples and safe, free font downloads, visit fontpair.co

widow and orphan protection

A widow is a lone word or a short word group at the bottom of a paragraph, column, or page.

Widows can make long sections of text look unbalanced and messy, leaving too much excess white space at the end of a page.

To address widows, follow these suggestions:

Extend the edge of your text frame

Even slightly extending the side of your text frame (just a millimeter or two) can help tidy up widows. In software like Adobe InDesign, use the Selection Tool (V or Escape) to pull the right or left edge of your text frame, extending it until the widow is pulled into the main body of the paragraph.

Apply optical margin alignment

This method shifts small text elements (like commas, apostrophes, and serifs) to sit outside the edge of the text frame. It not only makes paragraphs look more symmetrical but also helps align widows.

Adjust tracking or kerning

If dealing with a stubbornly resistant tiny word, consider reducing tracking (letter-spacing across a group of words or a paragraph) or adjusting kerning (letter-spacing between individual letters) slightly to create a more elegant solution.

An orphan is a similar unwanted straggler, but it appears at the top of a page.

Orphans disrupt the flow of reading across two pages and look untidy on the page where they appear.

To prevent orphans, follow these suggestions:

Use software features that automatically adjust text to prevent single lines of a paragraph from appearing alone at the top or bottom of a page.

Edit the text. Rewriting or editing can solve many problems, including orphans. Delete dangling words by editing out a word or two or use a longer or shorter word somewhere in the paragraph.

Text Alignment and Spacing

Alignment and spacing play a crucial role in establishing hierarchy within a document or presentation. They guide the reader’s eye, emphasize important elements, and create visual appeal. Alignment refers to how the text is justified, which means aligned along the left and right margins of a document to create a visually straight and balanced appearance.

The following infographic explains the four types of justification and when to use each:

Notice that the above examples are not indented. Do not indent business paragraphs and document sections. Instead, left align and add white space in between paragraphs and sections.

White space is, of course, just space. But like silence, it is remarkably powerful. In text design, spacing can guide the reader’s eye.

To enhance readability, direct attention, and reduce text density, build white space into your document: keep your lines short with columns or margins, write short paragraphs, and use appropriate vertical spacing.

Keeping text lines short makes reading faster and easier. To help your reader’s eye quickly capture each line, limit text lines to between 52 and 70 characters. How? Two- or three-column layouts shorten text lines. Similarly, generous margins automatically shorten line length.

Paragraph and section breaks give your readers a break. The traditional paragraph formula—topic, three to five supporting sentences, and a conclusion/transition sentence—can lead to dense, daunting blocks of text. To efficiently convey your message, craft short, digestible paragraphs—one to three sentences per paragraph.

Short paragraphs enhance readability and respect the reader’s time, ensuring clear communication by making the content more inviting and easier to scan. So instead of following the traditional rule, be more flexible: don’t make your paragraphs so long that they appear uninviting to read.

Line spacing is not an earth-shattering issue, but it can affect readability. Single spacing can appear too dense and uninviting, but double spacing can make the document appear long and overwhelming. Consider this rule of thumb: default line spacing in both Google Docs and Microsoft Word is 1.15.

When in doubt, check your organization’s style guide for vertical line spacing standards. If you want to read more about line spacing, check out this Grammarly blog post.

Parallelism and Headings

You may be wondering about the definitions of grammatical parallelism and structural parallelism.

Grammatical parallelism means that all same-level headings start with the same part of speech.

Structural parallelism refers to creating consistent, balanced patterns in the overall organization of ideas. As it pertains to headings, structural parallelism means that all same-level headings are consistently symmetrical. For example, if one main-level heading is a talking heading, then all main-level headings must be talking headings. Alternatively, if one main-level heading is a topic heading, then all main-level headings must be topic headings.

What is the difference between talking and topic headings? Talking headings make a statement or ask a question. Topic headings list concepts.

As long as same-level headings remain grammatically and structurally parallel, use a combination of talking and topic headings within the same document or presentation.

Save time by learning and using style formatting tools for titles, headings, and body text. Apply styles to your headings to easily generate an outline or change the style or color of all your headings with one click. Here's how it's done in Google Docs: Select Heading Styles in the icon ribbon. (Word, Canva, various Adobe products, and other text editors have similar capabilities.)

The document above illustrates correct grammatical and structural parallelism.

In Conclusion

Well-designed text creates precise and concise documents. Audience-focused text design can inspire your audience to act on your idea, purchase your product, or change their minds.

Follow the rules for formatting text so your audience will remember the information, make better decisions, and appreciate your expertise.

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