How Document Design Can Take Your Business to the Next Level
As a team of copywriters and graphic designers, document designs are some of our favourite projects to collaborate on. While I’m working on tone of voice, language, content structure, headlines, and calls to action, Stewart and Chris are taking care of layout, organisation, branding, alignment, graphic styles, imagery, illustrations, and production.
When all of those elements come together, the results can be striking, and our print and digital publications have yielded significant results for our clients.
So we wanted to share some tips while showcasing some of our recent document designs here at the Mammoth studio.
The Stephen James Partnership
A document design project with legal recruitment specialists The Stephen James Partnership provided an opportunity to analyse and develop the company’s brand identity while creating new digital Capability Statements for each of their sector teams.
Our objective was to convey a bold, modern, and professional aesthetic while maintaining consistency with the established SJP brand identity. At the same time, we needed to differentiate the firm’s various sector teams under a cohesive brand.
We achieved this by expanding the brand’s colour palette to include a series of new secondary colours to distinguish the sector teams, while keeping the distinctive SJP navy blue as the predominant colour throughout the documents.
A skilful use of repetition and contrast helps to keep the reader engaged. Repetitive elements and consistent layout formats convey a sense of progress, achieving a better flow through the document. Meanwhile, contrast adds definition to focal points and provides a sense of visual balance, enhancing the reading experience.
To add depth to the designs, we created new vector shapes by zooming in on the SJP logo and setting it to stripes or tramlines, partly inspired by Paul Rand’s classic 8-bar design for the IBM logo. The geometric symmetry and straight lines convey stability, reliability, and strength, providing a range of stylish visual motifs for brand building across digital formats.
What we learned:
Document design projects can provide an ideal platform to work simultaneously on brand building and development.
bizzscholar
This project involved the creation of a pitch deck PDF to help a startup win investment.
Bizzscholar is a freelance platform that connects academics and businesses in new ways. We worked with the company’s founder Zaheera Soomar to develop the content and communicate her vision in a compelling document.
The design of a pitch deck needs to be guided by its purpose – to quickly capture the attention of its audience, generally a forum of potential investors. User experience therefore shaped our strategy. Is our reader obtaining the information they need, at the right time, to feel engaged with this story? Are we overloading them with information, or making too many assumptions about their level of knowledge in this area? It can be extremely challenging to find the right balance for an effective pitch deck.
Stewart is a rare breed of designer in that he enjoys transforming complex information and seemingly incomprehensible data sets into comprehensible and visually pleasing graphics. In an industry filled with frustrated artists, few find so much pleasure in redesigning annual reports and corporate presentations!
So the technical processes and competitor landscape of an AI-enabled digital platform held no fears for Stewart, who created a suite of branded vector shapes and custom infographics, diagrams, and icons to illustrate the material.
The energy and vision of startup founder Zaheera Soomar propelled the project, and we made sure that the document harnessed that energy to tell the bizzscholar story in a powerful way.
What we learned:
User experience is vital for pitch deck presentations – simple to read and navigate, with a clear narrative structure to guide readers through the story of the startup.
Thompson Cole
Redesigning the Capability Statement of Thompson Cole, a boutique firm of chartered quantity surveyors and project managers, posed a unique set of challenges.
The document is designed to showcase the firm’s previous work to prospective clients, so we let their projects do the talking by foregrounding a series of images of impressive buildings in their portfolio. Negative space around the images and captions allows the pages space to breathe, while the use of contrast enables every page to stand out from the last.
Alignment in document design is vital to achieve a professional finish, and establishing layout and formatting principles allows a designer to break the rules at times to allow things to stand out. Focal points are elevated in this manner throughout the Capability Statement.
What we learned:
As the old saying goes, a picture really is sometimes worth a thousand words, and negative space and contrast can help them stand out to become focal points of a document.
Southcoast
We were tasked with creating a sales brochure for Southcoast, an events company based at the University of Brighton, as part of a major rebrand.
This project involved the creation of a campaign to encourage customers to book a holiday with Southcoast at the University of Brighton. The campaign was based around a question – “Why visit the south coast?” – and our series of answers, revolving around 7 words…
The copy was shaped by a distinctive tone of voice for the Southcoast brand – fun, informative, open to all – the ideal travel companion!
Meanwhile the design was aligned with our branding project, utilising a wave shape from the logo as a recurring motif throughout the document. Using imagery kindly supplied by VisitBrighton, we produced a document that made us all desperate for an ice cream on Brighton beach. Brief = hit!
What we learned:
When thinking about tone of voice, make sure your copy stands out from the crowd. If you replaced the company name with an industry competitor, would it look odd, or would it fit seamlessly? If it’s the latter, you still haven’t found your distinctive tone of voice.
Do you need our help to sprinkle some stardust on your document designs? Whether you’re an established brand or a startup; and whether it’s a sales brochure, a pitch deck PDF, a Capability Statement, or any other print or digital publication, get in touch to find out how great document design can take your business to the next level.
