One of the biggest report design frustrations is something that’s not on most people’s radar.
I talk about this in my book The Reporting Revolution (it‘s only $5, you should buy it!), but I’ve also talked about the concept in workshops. Here is a clip from my Everyday Report Design workshop.
Most evaluators and researchers try to write, design, and illustrate their reports all at the same time – usually the night before it’s due. This multitasking approach is why your reports feel like a struggle and often don’t look as good as you’d hoped.
There’s a better way: Split the work into three parallel tracks – writing, design, and illustration.
In this video, I’ll show you how to:
- Separate your writing from your design work
- Use placeholder text (lorem ipsum) to design before you write
- Get approval on layouts early, before investing time in content
- Reduce the late-night stress of making reports “look pretty”
This simple process shift will save you time and create better-looking reports.
Prefer the transcript?
Here’s another process thing that I do. I split writing from design from illustration.
Here’s the process that most people do – this is how a lot of organizations work: You write, edit, edit, edit, add some charts, and then it goes to a designer. “Hey, can you make this pretty?”
Then they come back with something. You share it with some people, maybe somebody on a communications team. Probably not though – a lot of you do everything yourself.
Then you stay up really late trying to make it look better because it has to go out the next day, and you’re like “I don’t really like how this looks. It looks kind of ugly.”
So you’re just sitting there tired, thinking “this is not quite right, but it needs to be sent tomorrow.”
There’s another way to do it. We can stop trying to multitask so much.
See, report writing is not really just writing. If it was, it would be a lot easier. But it’s part writing, part graphic design, part illustration.
The problem is we try to do all three of these things at the same time. It’s really hard to do all three at the same time, even for somebody who’s good at each of them.
It’s better to split them and do them in parallel.
For writing, you can just open up a Google Doc or Word document and write. That’s your written report. You can use basic headers. You can create something really long – that’s fine, because you’re just writing the text that you need to write.
For your design, you can use lorem ipsum. In Canva, if you click on the apps tab and search for lorem ipsum, you’ll see a few different ones.
I’ve used one called Ken Lorem – it just lets you add a generic paragraph to the design. So I can design and add spaces for images like placeholders before I write any content.
Then I can share early on: “Here’s what I think the design will look like.”
Not only am I saying “I’m going to have a 4-pager” or “I’m going to have a slide doc” – I can show a template with some fake data based on what you know is coming in the report.
Here’s how I’m going to build it. Then you can get approval before you even go through the process of making it happen.
And then I illustrate separately. Design is a separate step, illustration is separate, writing is separate.
Illustration for me is all about serving the words. I try to find the messages, the interesting things. The illustration is what’s going to lead people in. It creates openings for people to understand the content.