Get in top form; tips for making great-looking forms

Home Office Computing, Dec, 1992 by Steve Morgenstern

Tips for Making Great-Looking Forms

Every time you send out an order form, an invoice, a shipping document, a credit application, or any other business form, you have a chance to reinforce your company's image. Do your forms have the crisp, well-designed appearance one expects from a professional organization, or do they look amateurish? Are your forms set up to make filling them out as easy as possible, or have you failed to think of the needs of those who must do so? Business forms may not include descriptive text, but they can reveal an awful lot about your business.

MERGING FORM WITH FUNCTION

This month, let's consider some of the ways you can create business forms that effectively combine form and function. Reinforce your company's identity. Any business, large or small, should strive to create a design identity--a distinctive visual presence that makes your printed materials immediately recognizable. All of your business forms should adhere to this design standard.

What constitutes a visual identity (or, if you're big enough to consider yourself corporate, a corporate identity)? The first item on the list is a company 1ogo. It needn't be an ornate production number--all-type logos can be simple, attractive, and effective. But whether you choose to use type alone or to add graphic elements, your company 1ogo must be graphically pleasing and consistently presented.

Your company's identity may extend beyond the 1ogo to include the use of a particular colored ink--think of Kodak's bright orange or IBM's "big" blue. You may also want to standardize your documents using a particular typeface or set of typefaces on all of them, including business forms.

When you design business forms, the closer you can adhere to all aspects of your overall design identity, the better. Including your company logo is the one absolute requirement. That may seem obvious, but I frequently receive business forms that give no immediate clue to the sender' s identity. You're an important company. You communicate that message in no uncertain terms when your 1ogo is prominently displayed on your shipping document, product order forms, and so on.

Use highly readable type. There is a traditional bias toward using a sans serif typeface, such as Helvetica, in business-form design. Personally, I don't see any advantage in making sans serif type the rule. The guiding principle in typeface selection isn't the presence or absence of serifs, but the need for legibility. This extends from the headlines and brief descriptive labels down to the smallest type on the page. Use either sans senf or serif type, but make sure it can be read at a glance. That means using typefaces with large open spaces in the enclosed parts of letters (for instance, the loops of the p, g, a, and e), tall ascenders (such as the above-the-line sections of the t and 1), and long descenders (like the below-the-line parts of the g and y).

Some typefaces, such as Bodoni and Walbaum, offer a lot of variation in the thickness of the lines used to draw the letters. These faces generally don't make good choices for form use. Try type with a more consistent line weight instead, such as the sans serif News Gothic or Univers or the serif Lucida or Stymie. And if you want to use a serif typeface, avoid heavily ornamented fonts that look frilly and precious.

While we're on the subject of typefaces, try like the devil to avoid the stigma of "the fine print." We all know that the fine print is filled with tricks, traps, skulduggery, and every kind of nastiness a slick lawyer can dream up. That's what people will think, even if your fine print really has the most helpful kind of information in the world. simply because it is fine print. If at all possible, eschew obfuscation and phrase any text on your form in clear, concise terms printed in large enough type for a normal human to read. If need be, give the basics on the form itself and point the reader to an out-of-the-way spot where any additional ipso factos that are required can be found-- perhaps on the back of the form, or in a nice gray block of legalese tucked inside a publication accompanying the form. This advice is, of course, subject to your lawyer's approval.

Lead your reader through the form. Note that I refer to the person facing your form as a reader. That's an important concept to keep in mind, because it suggests the right organizational plan. Even though there won't be a lot of text to read on your form, organize it as if it were a text-based page--that is, lead your reader from left to right, and from top to bottom. Don't expect the person dealing with the form to work down the left side Of the form and then start up again at the top, or to hop from the skinny rectangular box at the top left to the big one in the middle and then back up to the square box at the top fight and down to the... you get my drift. Take one of your current forms (or your design for a new one), get a fat magic marker, and draw big arrows connecting the sections of the form in the order you expect the recipient to deal with them. Do they make a nice, neat left-to-fight progression down the page, or is the text block the reader is supposed to start with stuck down at the bottom?