Desktop Publishing - Document Design

Instructions for Teachers

Alternatively you can ask your students to find two pieces of published material each. The pieces should be quite different from each other, e.g. a school prospectus and a leaflet advertising a sale of electrical items.

It would probably be useful to go through the questions below with the students, using two sample documents as examples. Using discussion and questioning you can illustrate the sorts of things they could talk about, before asking them to work through the questions by themselves, using their own choice of documents.

Specialist vocabulary required:

• body text
• font
• font styles (also bold, italic and underlined)
• serif font
• sans serif font
• whitespace

Questions for Students

1. Give the title of each document and describe briefly what they contain.
2. Describe what you think the purpose of each document is. Include who you think the document is aimed at and what it is trying to achieve. Is it aimed specifically at smokers, or young people, or supporters of a particular political party? Is it trying to encourage you to visit a particular shop or is it trying to influence how you live your life in some way? Are there any ways in which the two documents are similar? In what ways are they different?
3. Write down in a table the number of different fonts (e.g. Times Roman, Arial, etc.) that are used in each of the two documents (see table below).
4. Write down in a table how many variations in font are used in each document, i.e. variations in size, style (bold, italic, underlined, etc.) and colour (see table below).

   Document Name	Number of fonts	Number of different font sizes	Number of different font styles	Number of different font colours
   ...	...	...	...	...

5. Is there a particular way in which the fonts have been used, e.g. sans serif fonts for headings and serif fonts for body text?
6. Describe how the two documents use pictures, logos and other graphics.
7. Does either document put the text into several columns? If so, how are the columns arranged?
8. Look carefully at both documents and describe how they have used whitespace. How much space has been left and how does this effect the final document? Are the documents easy to read? Can you find what you need quickly? Does the design encourage you to read them?
9. Describe any other design features that have been used, such as lines, bars, text in inverted colours, boxes, etc. Make a list for each document.
10. Make a list of any features that are standard to both documents. Usually a document will include contact details, such as the name of the organisation, its address, telephone and fax numbers, web site and e-mail addresses and so on. An order form or some other kind of reply form may be included. There may also be a summary of the main points covered by the document.

    You will have looked at your two documents in great detail by now. One particular company or organisation will often set up a "house style". This is a set of rules about how documents should look, so that all the output from the company looks similar and is instantly recognisable, through the use of standard fonts and colours, as well as more obvious things such as the company logo. Designers often achieve a very professional look, by using a minimum of different text effects and design elements. "Simple, but effective" often seems to be the rule.

11. What parts of the design do you think make your two documents look professional?