21st Century Factsheet
Rapid. Agile. Exponential. These are the words we use today to describe the way technology has influenced how we do business and how we reach audiences in the 21st Century. When it comes to developing brand collateral, this means one design for many purposes to keep up with the speed of change. For your factsheets to keep up, we advocate designing once for multiple uses. Your audience’s wants, needs, and limitations should be considered from the beginning, and the final product should look great whether it is used online or offline.
We’ve worked for years with these goals in mind serving multiple clients across industries, and we believe we’ve developed the best future-forward design solutions for factsheets. At Design Positive we design factsheets according to the following principles.
Persuasive and Fluid
Harmonious reading is accomplished when design and branding work together to help illustrate your message. Since your brand’s goal is to provide your audience with valuable content, and your copy carries the weight of delivering that goal, design elements need to support the copy first and foremost. The information hierarchy on your factsheet must be designed with the intent to provide ease of consumption for the targeted audience. This includes design of sidebars, quotes, charts, graphs, etc. When you choose images, they should speak volumes and support the focus of your message. Infographics are also great, when needed. Your branding should be there for personalizing your factsheet, but it shouldn’t get in the way of your core message. Copy is king, design supports the message for ease of consuming your intent.
Deadline and Budget Friendly
From our perspective, there are two purposes for factsheets: first, to profile your company — communicating your company’s big picture and key statistics on one page. Second, to highlight your company’s particular services and/or speak to your unique audiences. In other words, you could organize your factsheets around your services, or around different stakeholders, or even a combination of the two.
Factsheets should also be designed to support fluid workflows. Designing your company profile factsheet first, establishing your content hierarchies and brand norms from the get-go, creates a template that limits the parameters for your brand’s team of designers, writers, and content approvers. This saves time and money by creating less experimental guesswork, and encouraging quick turn-around that is on-brand, no matter the need of your audience.
Designed for Multiple Purposes
Whether your audience interacts with your brand collateral through print or online, you really only need to design one factsheet for either point of conversion. We recommend the following checklist when designing your factsheets:
- Optimize for Personal Printing: design at 8.5” x 11” with minimal bleeds and limited use of ink, this encourages printing on the fly for in-person sharing
- Hyperlinks: provide additional information and improve SEO, shorten using services like goo.gl or bitly.com
- Web Optimized File Size: reduce the file size of the PDF for quick download and/or emailing, and easier viewing on mobile devices
- Keyword Rich Copy: improves SEO
- Design for Accessibility: make your final PDF accessible and expand your reach while also increasing SEO
- Optimize for Professional Printing: make your factsheets look sharp by choosing nice recycled paper and coatings
Doing business in the 21st century requires designing around saving time — creating time savings for you and time savings for your audience. Design once, use multiple times in multiple situations. We believe making a factsheet easy to consume and easy to produce is the only way forward.
Feel free to reach out at hello@designpositive.co to learn more about how factsheets can work for you. To learn more about how to integrate your factsheets into a full brand collateral print package, see our article on the FlexFolder.
