Vertical = Print, Horizontal = Screen

(It’s been a long time, blah blah blah.)

If you are a designer of paper or screens, here is an easy UX issue: vertical pages suggest (or encourage) printing while horizontal pages suggest on-screen reading. (This is a generality, not an absolute truth.) Early in the process, ask the question “what would we like our audience to do?” (You might also ask “what can we realistically expect our audience to do?”)

People still print things. So if you are designing a piece that you really don’t want people to print, try starting with a page size that better fits the screens they are likely to see it on.

Clever computer trickery, such as online “flip books” (those clever things that look like books and even make noise when you “turn” the page) may be sexy, but they get in the way of ordinary people trying to get to real information. The same is true of PDF files that use security features to prohibit people from doing almost anything but reading the file online. By taking control away from the audience, you are effectively saying “I don’t trust you.”

And speaking of PDF fails, PDFs with “reader spread” pages are also part of the “I don’t trust my audience” family (or worse, “I don’t really understand how this will be viewed”). If you are designing a booklet that benefits from people seeing facing pages, use the Acrobat Initial View feature to set the file so that page layout and magnification display what you want. That way, if (or when) your audience goes to print your booklet, they won’t be printing 11x17 (or A3) pages reduced to letter size, then struggling to ready the tiny type. Alternatively, if you think most readers will be viewing your publication on a screen, design for that, not print.

Compared to the structured content and flexible layout required for e-books and responsive design, choosing the right page shape is pretty simple, but it reflects the same user-focused perspective that designers are well-suited to help clients think through. Separating content from form while maintaining some control and influence over the style and presentation of information is a change that many designers and clients are struggling with. Starting with the right page shape is a place to start.

Son of presentation landscape

In July, Nancy Duarte created a great visualization she titled Presentation Landscape. I really like her diagram, but as I showed to a few people there were questions about the X axis, particularly the slideument-preso continuum.

I thought about my own experience helping non-designers deal with the world of documents, slideuments, and presentations. The way that good visuals often start life as sketches on napkins or whiteboards, and the way those ideas often need to flow back and forth between different forms over the life of a project. (And the way that once something gets into Powerpoint, it often seems to get trapped there.)

When you think about the journey of an idea and how projects often evolve, it seems like it’s difficult to resist using existing slides that may have been fine for a working thinkpiece, but are really not up for the important presentation or executive briefing. And sometimes PP is not the right tool for making documents. And sometimes (gasp) no documents or paper are necessary at all (yikes, what am I saying?). Picking up on Nancy’s original point, the same slide or deck may not be worth fighting for one day, but may be ill-suited for a higher stakes presentation later in the project.

Anyway, this little diagram is trying to visualize what I was thinking, maybe build on Nancy’s brilliant original. I hope she’s not offended.

(Geek alert: you can hide the path layer to just see where different forms map.)