Design and layout can make your communication come alive and your message immediately apparent. Now, with so much technology at hand, design becomes much easier, but you must develop the ability to plan and visualize what you want to convey. Then decide what will appeal to your readers and help them understand the material.

Plan to use spacing, underling, indenting, numbering, and different sizes and types of lettering to make your message more visually appealing and understandable. Learn to think in terms of text formats that set off paragraphs; typefaces to denote sections; use of graphs and colors; drawings, flowcharts, and lists that promote your massage and reinforce it to your readers.

Think about your content, know your readers and decide what, precisely, they need to know. Decide what you want to emphasize, and how you will create special displays.

Examine your text for ways to make it visually more appealing. Use white space to create the impression that your communication is easy to read and create tables to display large important groups of data.

Here are four guidelines to aid you in designing graphics that are understandable at a glance:

1. Reduce graphics to their simplest, clearest elements.

2. Use complete titles that answer the who, what, why, when, where, and how questions.

3. Locate graphics near the related text.

4. Make graphics appropriate to their contents in size and arrangement.

Remember that graphics supplement your written message; they dont replace it.

The last thing you will need to do is pay special attention to the layout of text and images. The eye focuses first on the upper outside corner of a left-hand page and the lower outside corner of a right-hand page.

And above all, tests read your communication and make any necessary changes.

By following these guidelines for design and layout, you will be able to make any communication come alive. And in todays world of technology, desktop publishing and computer capabilities create many possibilities.