20 top tips for white paper designers

First time ever designing a white paper?

You can make that a smash hit or a total flop.

It’s as simple as that.

White paper readers don’t demand anything fancy. They just want a document that’s easy to scan, easy to read, and professional.

If you give them that, they’ll likely scan it to pick up the basic ideas.

If you don’t, they won’t look at it for more than a few seconds.

And they certainly won’t be impressed with the company behind that document.

What do I mean by that?

These days, most white papers are read on the screen. Only a tiny fraction are ever printed out on paper.

For example, the Engagement Statistics from Contently showed that only 5% of long-form content is ever printed out. The other 95% of the time, visitors read it on screen.

That means your document must be easy to scan, easy to read, and look professional on the screen.

Easy to scan: Most people scan a page before they read it. They may even scan quickly through the whole white paper to decide whether to read it.

A good design shows the structure of a white paper at a glance:

• All the main sections must be obvious
• Headings must be bold and perhaps in a vibrant color
• Each level (Heading1, Heading2, and so on) must stand out from the rest

Easy to read: After someone decides to spend more time with your white paper, they will start reading. Here’s where you can lose them quickly.

Good typography makes a white paper easy to read on the screen:

• Text must be contrasty (hint: black on white)
• Letters must be big enough to easily decipher (hint: 12+ point)
• White space must be ample around the margins

Professional: This refers to a reader’s first and perhaps lasting impressions of the document, and thus the sponsor.

The sponsor’s branding should be evident but not overpowering. You don’t need to show the company logo on every page. Showing the logo on the cover and again in “About the Company” is enough.

Professional design gives a reader a positive lasting impression of the sponsor:

• Every page must look “finished”
• Every element must be placed with care
• Everything should be consistent throughout: spacing, captions under photos, pull-quotes, everything

Don’t mix it up to be “creative.” That will only confuse some readers.

Why ruin someone else’s work? Why waste your client’s money?

Over the years, 7 of my 320 white papers have been totally ruined by amateurish, unreadable designs.

That’s only 2%. But every time, it hurt.

Here’s why:

• I worked hard to make the text clear and the argument compelling
• But all my efforts were ruined by an unreadable design
• Plus, my client’s time and money was wasted

No white paper design fail needs to happen.

There are 20 sensible rules of thumb that any designer can follow to create a highly readable, professional, scannable white paper.

This table lists the main things I consider essential for any white paper design.

None of these are rocket science.

This list combines things I learned from Old School typographers many years ago, plus what I’ve noticed reading thousands of white papers, on-screen and on paper.

* For more help ask your white paper writer.

** For details, see this article.

First, people notice the cover

Effective editorial design is a skilful combination of text and graphics.

People tend to notice graphics first. That’s why you must create an engaging cover for any white paper.

On the cover, I much prefer photos to graphics. To me, a photo says “real world” while a graphic says “we made this up on the screen.”

Ideally, your cover image will show the target reader doing whatever they do in their target role in their target industry.

That way, anyone glancing at the cover can tell whether it’s for them or not.

Make sure the cover looks good shrunk down to a thumbnail.

If the cover image looks inviting and relevant, a prospect will more likely download the white paper and read it.

If not, they’ll click away to something else. And no matter how good the rest of the white paper is, your chance to influence that prospect is gone.

People really do judge a white paper by its cover.

Then they scan the text

More than any other piece of B2B content, a white paper must be read.

That’s where the typography of the text comes in.

Here are the essential rules that all designers should follow:

To be readable by anyone over 40, text must be 100% black

People’s eyes begin to change when they hit 40. Most people start to need more light and more contrast to resolve small details.

That certainly happened to me, even though I don’t need reading glasses and I can still read tiny type.

Text columns must be 60 characters wide max

When we read English, our eyes make a series of sweeping motions from left to right, capturing a set of letters and words with each motion.

When a line of text is 100+ characters wide, that forces our eyes to sweep over a long way and then return far back to the start of a new line.

That’s tiring. And that’s when our brains tell us, “Forget it! This is too hard to read. Do something else.”

Set text ragged right with no hyphenation

Some clients love how neat and tidy justified columns appear.

But the only way to achieve that tidy look at the edges is to add tiny slices of white space between letters and words.

White space AROUND your text: good.

White space INSIDE your text: bad.

The routine way to avoid rivers of white within paragraphs of justified text is to add hyphens. Unfortunately, the default setting for hyphenation in today’s design software is moronic.

I’ve seen desktop software break words like this:

• sy-stem
• did-n’t
• Ora-cle
• des-ign

Arghhhh! What an amateur-night show!

You can avoid rivers and bad hyphens by setting your text flush left (align left) without hyphenation.

Keep widows and orphans with their paragraphs

A widow is a single line of text at the top of a page. An orphan is a single line of text at the bottom of a page.

Remember: An orphan is left behind, while a widow must go on alone.

Even worse is a heading with 1 or 2 lines of text at the bottom of a page.

Any of these looks thoughtless and distracting.

Keep those families together! Check all your pages for widows and orphans and take care of them.

I’m not just being a purist: This stuff matters

Every bit of grey text, every bad hyphen, every widow is a distraction. Add up enough of those, and some readers will be jolted right out of the text.

Every time that happens, they’re tempted to switch their attention to something else. You can easily lose them for good.

White paper designers: Your job is to create pages that are easy to read. Make sure you do it.

         Click to get the design checklist

Get the white paper design checklist

For a PDF of these 20 tips for white paper designers, click here or on the thumbnail.

Whether you’re a marketer or a writer, feel free to pass this checklist on to any designer working on a white paper.

Your readers will thank you.

So will your client.

 

 

 

 

---

For more great tips like this, get my free newsletter.