: How do people create visual designs for text documents (such as ICO whitepapers and investment prospectuses), and what software do they use? By "design", I mean this sort of minimalist visual

@Samaraweera207

I have actually been designing whitepapers and text-heavy documents/financial reports/etc for a long time. Hundreds of them, and some in 15+ languages. You could say I kind of specialize in this. All of them, without exception, have been laid out in InDesign and the finished product was a PDF (high and/or low resolution, depending on the purpose of each job).

For a document similar to your example, one would either create a custom template or buy and customize a ready made one. Again, most likely in InDesign, since this is kind of the standard, but alternatives do exist. However, note, in the business world, pretty much everybody uses InDesign.

The good part here is, once a template has been set up, it can easily be replicated and applied for future work.

Some corporate clients would have their own ready-made templates delivered as part of their branding packages. Some of these will be very detailed and actually include rules for constructing and formatting graphs, charts, tables, etc.

Still, there are many whitepapers and ebooks out there which circulate in a pretty basic Word-like design. Either in plain DOC format or as PDF exports.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Moriarity648

The designer Jan White identified rock solid principles for functional document design over the course of his 40+ year career, and free e-book versions of his design books are available on his site. I find them very valuable for meat-and-potatoes, Swiss-style treatments of text-heavy documents, and have very easy to understand explanations of the rationale behind his design decision-making. www.janvwhite.org/

Vote Up Vote Down

@Kevin459

The usual industry standard page layout software is Adobe InDesign, but there are others, such as QuarkXpress, and even free software like Scribus(dot)org. As for the design itself, it comes down to the designers taste.

You can buy pre-made templates if design isn't really your thing. Basically all you then have to do is add more pages and enter your own text.

MS Word isn't much use for design for print because it doesn't support basic requirements like CMYK colour - which is needed for making separations for making printing plates.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Vandalay110

Is this all done in MS Word? Or is there more specialized software?


Most likely the answer that is: No! (altough some people would say its, hell no or even over my dead body)

In fact this document is, according to metadata, been done in Indesign CC 2017.

The reason you would have hard time producing print ready files in Word is that it does not support CMYK color. Also it will start to berak images after your page count racks up. Further placement of items tend to swim around after you edit things.

I wouldnt use word for making thse kinds of things even if I couldn't afford inDesign. Word is a acceptable word processor but not a good layout tool. Hell, I'd probably have better luck and workfloww writing printer code manually*.

As for the resto f your question... Well, simply put, too broad. Also very premature considering your knowledge level.

* But then I would know this since I indeed have done so. Just because i can.

Vote Up Vote Down