McGrew's Communicating with Color:
Fight Flat Formatting! Flexibility Fundamentals

By Pat McGrew, EDP, Kodak's Graphic Communication's Group

When you look at the bills and statements that arrive in your mailbox, you probably don’t sit back and think, “My, what great formatting.” In fact, if it is done well, the overall information design, typeface selection, type size selection, color selection and the interaction of all those elements with the data shouldn’t cause any comment at all. Poor formatting becomes evident when you can’t find a piece of information that you need to complete your actions with the billing statement.

Can you find the information on how to contact a person to discuss a problem? Can you understand the line items on the document? Is it clear how to pay the bill or to inform the provider of a problem with the statement? A well-designed bill will do all of these things.

Does the bill contain information that is of no use to the recipient? Does it include routing or batch numbers that are useless when the customer calls to ask a question? Does it explain interest calculation rules in Arkansas to a customer in Ohio? Does it provide incorrect phone numbers or mailing addresses to contact the biller based on the location of the customer?  Sadly, many do.

These are some common faults and if we dig deeper, we can find many more. Combine these faux pas with type that is too small to be read by the average customer, inflexible formatting that crams data into inappropriate templates and a ransom note approach to typeface selection, then there is a lot of room for improvement.

What should you do to start the journey toward a well-formatted document? Start by reading. My friends, Dr. Michael Turton and Bill Broddy, wrote a white paper for CanadaPost that you can grab from the CanadaPost Web site at http://www.canadapost.ca/business/campaigns/greatstatements -- there, you will see a link to Tools and Resources. This link also provides access to a great online tool for checking your statements against the best practices described in the white paper.

After you spend some time with the Great Statements white paper, you will start to get the idea that the best documents speak to their recipients. Savvy companies understand that not all of their customers are created equally or provide equal value, so it makes sense to dynamically format customer-facing documents based on your relationship with them, their relationship with you and your current marketing campaigns.

This is one of the reasons that I tend to advise against a fixed-template approach to statements. During the initial transition from pre-printed forms to electronic forms using a template can help to ensure that all of the data will land as needed. Long term, however, this approach tends to lock in a mindset that tries to fit all communication into neat little boxes. 

So I encourage everyone to start by taking a look at the Great Statements white paper. If you have questions, drop me a line. If you want to challenge anything you read, drop me a line. If you have your own formatting story, drop me a line.  This is a dialogue!

Pat McGrew, EDP, is the Data Center and Transaction Segment Evangelist at Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group. Her email address is Pat.McGrew@kodak.com.