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.
Make the text approachable
Invite’em In
Why force a reader to scale a wall of text? There are lots of ways to invite the reader in.
Make the pace manageable
Keep’em Reading
Pull-quotes help, but really it’s about the technical stuff:
- margins
- measure (line length)
- hierarchy.
Make it fast to find
Help’em Navigate
The TGI leader guides contain multiple indicators and cross references to help the workshop leaders.
These side notes can clutter up a document, making it difficult to navigate. In some cases, though, a complete redesign was not an option, so I worked hard within the constraints to turn these notes into navigating elements. For the modules spreads (example #2) we were even able to add additional information.
