Creating Your Content- Design

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Creating Your Content- Design

- Once you have your content created and written, then it's time to sent it to design. Good content equals good design. All of your content should be highly visual, it's an important part of creating content in today's market. But how do you make all of your content visual? Let's go over a few design guidelines to keep in mind when creating your content. First, make sure that your logo and icon usage is on-brand and correct. You need to take into consideration typography, you might have a certain font that is appropriate for your brand that you need to use.

Make sure you're consistently using brand colors, Even though you can be creative with your content design, you want to make sure it looks like your company is an on-brand. You also want to use photography and image styles that also make sense for your brand, and that are engaging and visual. Let's walk through some major types of content design, starting with Ebook. Your Ebook cover should be visual and engaging. This is how you're gonna get people to download your Ebook, and this is what's gonna attract them to your content, the cover.

The title should be clear. Make sure that you don't have lots of different design around your title so that it obstructs it. Make sure your title is clear at all times. Watch for proper templating. Keep your design clean. Again, make sure that your Ebook cover, and your Ebook interior is extremely clean and easy to read. Use images that relate to the content. Something that you need to be aware of is having images throughout an Ebook that have nothing to do with the content.

Make sure your images are relatable, and they make sense. Here's an example of cover design from the company NewsCred, that is extremely visually appealing. This is for one of their Ebooks on visual storytelling. Of course, because of the topic, you do expect the cover to be very engaging and visual. But it's something to point out because it's fun, it's interesting, it's very powerful, and it's clear and simple. Let's take a look at an example interior page from that same piece of content.

The interior page is clean, the way it's templated makes sense, it has a callout that pops out, and the title is obvious for the different headings and sections. You want to make sure that it's easy to read. Now, let's go over infographic design. Your infographic design should be engaging and shareable. This is definitely your opportunity to be creative and to pop. Consider a theme for your infographic. Make sure that your statistics are presented in an interesting, but legible way.

Make sure it's clear what those stats are so that your readers don't have any questions. Don't make your infographic too long. Don't make it too long in that, people have to scroll down quite a bit, and don't make it way too copy-heavy. Let's take a look at an infographic design example. This infographic was created by the company Marketo, on Snapchat for Brands. As you can see, the infographic is primarily purple, which is the color of Marketo's brand. It also has a bunch of different stats that are presented in an appealing and obvious, clean way.

The infographic also has some nice iconography throughout. Overall, it's easy to scan and easy to read. Now you have your content designed, it's important to make sure you edit that design. When editing a design, here are some items to watch for. Page layout, you want to make sure that all of your pages are laid out appropriately, and that they're easy to follow, and clean. You also want to watch for orphan words. These are words, or short lines at the beginning or the end of a paragraph which are left dangling at the bottom of the column, separated from the rest of the paragraph.

If you see any orphan words, make sure they're included in the above paragraph. You also want to look for photography and image usage, making sure the images go along with the text, as well as the placement in the document. Look at typography and make sure everything is the same size, and that if you do have a brand font, it's being used. Then, add edits using commenting in Adobe. This is the best and easiest way for designers to look at your edits. Let's take a look at what this looks like. Here's an example of editing in design.

This is done in Adobe Reader. As you can see, there's various commenting boxes, where edits are added. This makes it easy for the designer to see your edits within the actual design template itself. Sit down and make sure that you're reviewing all of your items once they're in design. If you don't, you really run the risk of having unfinished content. Make sure that you're looking over all your designed content, and edit it to completion.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-foundations/design