At our hospital, we get Pharmalerts in our email about once a week. These emails aren’t applicable to what I do, so I don’t read them, but every week I wonder just how many people actually do read them.
After just a few short weeks of seeing these alerts stream into my inbox, I started to mentally filter them out. I was immune to their effect. I associated the word “Pharmalert” at the top with a message that was going to be poorly designed and onerous to read. So I didn’t read them. While this has much to do with inapplicable content, it also has to do with design:
The original
Lots of fonts, bolds, italics, underlines, different colours, different list styles, some parts are centred some are left-aligned, etc. There’s a lot going on here.
A few minor adjustments
Nothing drastic here. Instead of using a lot of font weights, sizes and colours, I stuck with the least I could get away with. In my version there’s just two colours and one font family (Times New Roman) with bold accents.
Lessons
- Use as few ‘extras’ as possible. Try using just one font and add contrast by increasing size or adding a bold highlight.
- An accent colour should only be used to accent. It should not be used throughout the whole body of text.
- Whitespace, whitespace, whitespace. You can never have enough whitespace in documents like this. Divide your content into major chunks and give the chunks room to breathe.
Separate content from structure
When we put the two together and put them under a layer of blur, we can really see the design at work. Adding the blur forces you to think beyond content and narrow-in on structure. The original has lots of noise throughout the entire piece, while the second one is cleaner, has less distractions, and has way more whitespace.
Whether you’re making policy documents, precaution signs, or Pharmalerts, you should think critically about structure and design. Keeping things simple and free from clutter gives you a much better chance of getting read.