Information design: 7 ways to improve the communicating power of your corporate identity template

Whether you work on a presentation, report, or dashboard, your guiding design principles should be the same: make it functional not pretty, remove rather than add, story before facts. These principles are the core of my data visualisation workshops. Trainees usually walk out with improved documents and lots of ideas to experiment with. All too often, however, corporate templates limit them in applying these information design principles all the way. The reason is, I believe, that many of these templates were developed to produce good looking and distinctive documents, at the cost of making a point. Below I discuss seven template features I frequently run into which I think are not effective from an information design perspective.

1.  Logos & stuff in all corners

It is tempting to make sure the name or logo of the client, the agency, the stakeholders, the event, project, the team, the quarter, or the god knows what is visible on every page, but these visuals clutter your pages and draw unnecessary attention. This is the type of information you can share on the first or second page. You mention it once and everyone can carry on. Of course, one (modestly sized) visual such as a logo is not a problem; the upper right corner is the most appropriate position for it.

Tip 1: keep borders of your template free of fixed logos and labels

2.  Background shapes & visuals

To improve recognition, templates are often decorated with various distinctive yet meaningless shapes. That might work well for an ad, but the purpose of most of the documents we create is sharing information. Don’t forget human brains digest all information, whether it is valuable or not. So, as a rule of thumb, remove all visual clutter from your templates.

Tip 2: Keep your backgrounds clean

3.  Background light nor dark

The most powerful visual tool to draw attention is contrast. Contrast works best with light elements on a dark background and vice versa. If the background colour of the template is in between, your contrast becomes less effective.

Tip 3: Keep your background either dark or light

4.  Background gradients

Related to this are backgrounds with gradients. Colour gradients can ‘work’ in some cases but are not functional when they are part of a template. Again, consistently using contrast becomes a challenge. As a general use of thumb: use visuals or visual styles to reinforce or guide attention, not as decoration.

Tip 4: Don’t use gradients as part of your template

 5. Corporate colours

There is nothing wrong with consistently using corporate colours in your visuals. You must be aware though, that especially saturated colours draw attention, so using multiple bright colours will battle for it. In lots of situations, you can use a monochromatic colour palette (=1 colour used in different shades) to keep your slides serene without losing communicating power.

Tip 5: Use corporate colours modestly

6.Title placement

In the west, we read from left to right and from top to bottom, so that means that your title should be on the top and left-aligned.

Related to this, I always recommend keeping enough ‘breathing space’ in slides, i.e. don’t cram elements on top of each other so you can fit as much in one slide as possible. Too much space on the top, bottom and sides built into your template, however, is a waste of precious space.

Tip 6: Keep your title placement plain & simple

7. ALL CAPS.

EVER READ AN ARTICLE OR A BOOK IN ONLY CAPITALS? Probably not. There’s reason for it. First, it takes more energy for your brain to digest capitals. Second, you don’t want to suggest you are screaming at your audience. There are other, more appropriate ways to draw attention, e.g. a larger font size or using a salient colour.

Tip 7: Don’t use ALL CAPS

So, long story short: substitute fancy design features for simple ones and you immediately improve the communicative power of your documents. It's tempting to think that frills are necessary to stand out from the crowd, but they easily become visual noise. Clean and consistently designed documents make a more professional impression than messy ones. You want them to remember your story, not your decorations. As in most situations, less is more... 

Note: if you are interested in data visualisation, you might appreciate these earlier posts:

You had me at hello part I: creating better data visualisations

You had me at hello part II: identifying patterns in your data