Design your school work—Part 1: Layout
I’ve touched on a few little ways to improve the typography of your essays, but admittedly there are few people who actually care whether you use the right kind of dash. Presentation is a bigger part of essay writing than you might realise, a good clean, well designed essay can boost your marks in GCSE can before, and can be used to tell the amount of effort you put in higher up.
In a 4 part series, I will show you how interesting layouts can be used to make your work stand out from the rest of the pile, how colour can be your friend and your enemy, how your choice of font affects the experience your teacher gets and how the little details of type really do matter.
Layout is probably the most obvious way of designing an essay, but first you need to get out of the mindset that all essays have to have narrow margins, wide blocks of text and look boring. There are no rules to say that your essays must be any of those things.
The main thing that will limit your creativity in this area is the software you’re using. I use Apple’s Pages, a Mac only desktop publishing application that gives an immense amount of flexibility while still being easy to use. I highly recommend it to any Mac users. Unfortunately most of you will probably be using Microsoft Word—which while not ideal, must have the tools to do some basic designs.
Before I start talking about any specific design I want to introduce you to The Grid. There are many out there and it is probably best if you use one that someone else has made rather than trying to make one yourself; I would recommend The Grid System as a good place to find some. The one that I use (which I got from that site) is here to download in a more accessible format.
The idea is that everything on your page should line up to one of the lines on the grid.
If you have a baseline grid then every line of text must sit on it. This may take some tinkering with the line height but it is possible.
The standard, wide measure (block of text) essay can look quite good when put to a grid but it still doesn’t look particularly exciting.
What about making that measure narrower?
Or putting it on one side? That looks interesting and it leaves a nice space for your teachers to write comments in.
Who said you can only have one column of text?
Or that the columns need to be even.
And what about 4 columns? When was the last time you saw an essay that looked like that?
Which one is your favourite? Please leave a comment and tell me.
Use your creativity and design a really interesting layout but bear in mind that it has to be read. If your language reads from left to right then make sure that you left align or justify your text, make sure that your lines aren’t so long or so short that it is difficult to read and stick to the grid, it is your friend.