Friday lunch briefing by Colin Bottomley

2. The point of this is to discuss how we can improve the look of all printed and electronic material associated with Si. We don’t want anything amateur-looking bearing the famous Si baubles

4. The page on the right contains more text but is still more appealing to read

5. The point is, I’m not looking to you lot to do any difficult formatting , to create columns or pretty graphs… Just give me an indication of what text you want pulled out, mark it on your Word document somehow, and I’ll lay it out The same applies to Excel and any diagrams you’ve ripped off other people – Just make sure you send me the original spreadsheets or pdfs , then I can tweak the design

7. Of course photos make a huge difference. But I don’t expect anyone to spend ages image hunting. I can do that. All I need is a few keywords on PLACES and CONCEPTS such as… health, young people, Tyneside, rural. Please, please ask the client in advance though, as they’ve often got access to image libraries of their own that saves a huge amount of time.

8. For the time being, we don’t have any map software , and it’s illegal to keep ripping off Google Maps for any substantial piece of work. Plus, it doesn’t look very professional. We are currently looking in to getting some GIS software, but in the meantime, if you need to do intricate GIS analysis, the client should be able to provide the base maps.

9. The report template is located at G:DMINISTRATION & MANAGEMENTORMS & TEMPLATES. When you start any sort of report, start by using the report template . This is nothing to do with making your document look nice, it is to be used because it has a set hierarchy of subheadings, clear text, an automatic contents list and paragraph numbering. It is basic, clean and simple.

10. Your doc should stay in the Word template until it has been finalised and commented upon by you, the project manager, the client, god… whoever needs to. THEN it can go to Colin, where it can be DTP’d and sent out as the final version. Nothing goes out as a final copy if it’s still in the Word template format Obviously there will be times when you want it to look a bit smarter when it goes out for comment. In this case, we can do a front cover to go on the Word report, but no report should be sent out in Word as a final version . This is especially important for proposals.

13. Si presentation Template: G:DMINISTRATION & MANAGEMENTORMS & TEMPLATESresentation template Keep thinking visually … photos, diagrams, reduced amount of text Advance warning to Col… not always easy but at least gives a chance to get photos etc

14. Watch out for the position of your text – either put it in a clear space… … or bung it in a box. You can make the box slightly transparent if you really want to be clever.

15. Often for interviews we now print out the presentations on card to make ring-bound handouts which form a simple sort of ‘brochure’ for the client to keep, rather than printing out the presentation to hand out. If you want to do this, bear in mind that double-sided printing means the inner margin (for the binding) will change with every other slide…

17. Still a bit of a work-in-progress, but soon we should be able to send out mail fliers properly formatted, rather than just badly set text. In the meantime, remember to make sure any bulk emails are tidy and concise, especially for the networks – network fliers should really only be giving a teaser to link to the website , a series of essay-length news articles

18. It won’t be long before it would be advantageous to be able to submit some of our work as something to be uploaded to the clients website, rather than a couple of copies of a report and a pdf in an envelope. This is a little way off, but it will highlight the importance of the ways in which we lay out information in our reports.