case study #3
Making It Better
The Gottman Institute’s initial brief for their 289-page manual was to match the look of their NYT best-selling Seven Principles trade book.
I followed through for a few pages, and, unsurprisingly, the results were not any easier to digest than the manual they were using at the time. I suggested that we consider that a manual has a different purpose and is used differently than a book is, so the design might also be different. They loved the resulting concepts and in one year we worked on seven long-form projects together.
Why force a reader to scale a wall of text? There are lots of ways to invite the reader in.
Pull-quotes help, but really it’s about the technical stuff: