Desktop Publishing Design Guidelines: An Introduction
Background
In the past, organizations contracted with professional printing companies to
create and design company publications. Brochures, pamphlets, booklets, and client
reports are examples of typical documents that were prepared by professional printing
companies.
Over the past 15 years, increases in technology—computer systems, laser printers,
affordable desktop-publishing software—have shifted some publications from
professional printing companies to the actual organizations that need them. Today, many
organizations use their own employees to create and design some or all of their
publications. This form of designing and printing one’s own professional publications is
called desktop publishing.
Desktop Publishing Problems
While many people are creating desktop-published documents for their
organizations, some people are not adequately trained in design guidelines. Therefore,
their publications often lack a professional appearance.
These publications often contain too many font faces, inappropriate font weights,
and extremely small or large font sizes. In addition, these publications lack appropriate
space to separate document components, such as headings and paragraphs. These
unprofessional-looking publications reflect negatively on the organizations that create
and distribute their own publications.
2•Introduction
Solutions to the Problem
Clearly, business people need to be trained in basic desktop publishing design
guidelines. Therefore, this report discusses formatting and typography guidelines to help
you prepare professional-looking documents on your desktop computer. Specifically, this
report addresses these design areas:


Font Characteristics (Starts on page *)
o Font Face
o Font Style (Weight)
o Font Size
Spacing (Starts on page *)
o Margin Space
o Leading
o Line Spacing
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Selecting Font Characteristics
Before you start typing the document, you should select font characteristics.
These elements include font face, weight, and font size.
Font Faces
With thousands of font faces available at our fingertips, people are often tempted
to use as many different fonts as possible. However, a professionally formatted document
typically uses only two or three different fonts. Fonts should be used to facilitate the
reading of the document, not to satisfy the writer’s desire to “beautify” the document.
Two different fonts are necessary to distinguish text from headings. You should
choose one serif font and one sans serif font. A serif font has tiny lines at the ends of
most characters that guide the reader’s eyes across the line of text. A sans serif font has a
“clean” look; it does not have tiny lines at the ends of the characters.
Apply the serif font to the body of the document—regular paragraphs in the
document. Typical serif fonts include the following:

Bookman

Garamond

Palatino

Times New Roman
Use a sans serif font for titles, headings, and graphics captions. The reader can
easily locate headings on a page because the sans serif font stands out from the serif font.
Typical sans serif fonts include the following:
4•Selecting Font Characteristics

Antique Olive

Arial

Helvetica

Univers
When you choose a font, make sure it has about four font styles. A font style is a
variation of the actual font. The four primary font styles are regular, bold, italic, and bold
italic. Use one of the last three font styles to help enhance text instead of selecting
additional font faces.
Font Style (Weight)
When selecting a font face, you should also look at its weight. The weight of a
font refers to the degree of thickness of the font face. Regular weight is appropriate for
basic document text. You don’t want a font that is too light (thin) or too heavy (thick) for
paragraphs of text.
Headings, however, typically have a heavier weight than regular document text.
When choosing a sans serif font, be careful that it is not too heavy. Some heavyweight
fonts are difficult to read, because the characters seem to run into each other.
Font Size
In addition to choosing a font, you should carefully consider the font size. The
body of the document should be easy to read. Although Word’s default font size is
12 point, you can use between 10- and 12-point size. Point sizes below 10 are difficult to
read, and point sizes above 13 are too big and clumsy to read text-intensive documents.
Desktop Publishing Design Guidelines•5
You should, however, use larger font sizes for headings and titles. The font size
should reflect the particular level of the heading. For example, a chapter title should be in
a larger font than headings within that chapter. Depending on the document, you might
want to use a 14- or 16-point font size for headings within a section and 22- to 30-point
font size for titles. Your goal is to have a natural progression from the broadest heading
(the title) down to the most specific heading (such as a paragraph heading).
6•Setting the Spacing
Setting the Spacing
As you start to prepare the document, you must also consider spacing. Spacing
refers to margin space, leading, and line spacing.
Margin Space
Because your document must be aesthetically pleasing, you need to carefully
choose your margins. If the margins are extremely wide, the page has too much space. On
the other hand, setting very small margins makes the page look too full, which can be
intimidating to the reader.
Leading
Leading is the amount of white space between lines of text. You measure leading
from the base, or bottom, of one line of text to the base of the next line. While adjusting
leading, pay close attention to descenders, parts of characters that fall below the baseline,
such as the bottom part of a lowercase “p.” You don’t want descenders overlapping text
on the following line.
Some space is needed between the descenders and the top part of uppercase letters
on the following line. Typically, the default leading for font size is the font size plus two.
For example, if the font size is 14 points, the leading is about 16 points to allow for
descenders and a little space.
Often, publications have more leading immediately above a heading than below
it. The extra leading separates the end of a section and the beginning of the next section.
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Line Spacing
Manuscripts and other in-house business documents are typically double-spaced
to allow the readers to easily read the document. Published documents, such as booklets
and brochures, are often single-spaced since these documents are not extremely long.