"Templating" Your Pictures

by Patrick Hofmann

My favourite examples of documentation, and the documentation I've had the most fun producing, have one thing in common: they have templates that are wickedly designed and strictly followed. Applying the right template means headings, instructions, notes, and navigational features are effective and consistent. By standardizing our documentation's type and layout attributes, there are no unfriendly surprises for the reader, and mmmm, the documentation looks and feels so fresh and so clean.

We invest oodles of time coming up with the right combination of fonts, types, colours, sizes, margins, indents, all in an effort to make our documentation easier to use and something to drool over.

Why then do we not apply the same principles to our pictures?

After all, what's the biggest complaint about our pictures? Either there aren't enough of them, or the ones that we do have look inconsistent, misplaced, unprofessional, fuzzy, or merely not meaningful. Since we know the benefits of building effective documentation with templates, let's do the same with pictures.

Build Standard Sizes

More often than not, we draw our pictures at various sizes, then squeeze them into variously sized spaces -- a standard US letter page, a smaller A5 page, or a tiny help window. When reduced dramatically, the once nicely spaced lines in our pictures begin to bleed into one another, and the once legible text becomes utterly unreadable. When expanded dramatically, our crisply bitmapped pictures become roughly pixilated and just plain yucky.

To prevent this, always consider the picture's final destination when you create the picture (whether the documentation is on-screen or on-paper). For example, if the maximum size of any picture in your end-user manuals is 17 x 24.5 cm, create a "template" box at that size in your graphics application, so all of your illustrations never exceed it.

Likewise, if the maximum size of any picture in your online help is 320 x 320 pixels, create a template box of that size in your graphics application for all your online help illustrations.

But does that mean having multiple versions of the same illustration (if it goes to all destination documents)? Yep! Sadly, in the era of single-sourcing, we are encouraged to use the same picture file across many media, to rather fuzzy results! We think about our own efficiency in publishing a document, but not the customer's efficiency in reading it.

So, grit your teeth, trying flashing a smile, and remember: for each uniquely sized destination, create a uniquely sized illustration template.

Build Standard Attributes

Now that you've standardized the illustration size for each of your picture's destinations, we have to define the type, colour, and line attributes for each destination template. As shown in the illustration following, this means establishing style guidelines for each unique element in your illustration: titles and annotations, primary and secondary text, and primary and secondary objects.

Just as you create separate styles in your documents for chapter headings, section headings, notes, warnings, body text, and table text, do the same for your illustration templates. In the end, this brings a new level of consistency, professionalism, and userfriendliness not just to your pictures, but to the entire document.