Design your school work—Part 2: Colour
As promised, my second in a series of articles about improving the design of your school work will be about colour. If you missed the first article in the series about layout then I would recommend you read it.
Colour can really make a piece of work, but it can also totally destroy it. In the context of an essay, where the content is the primary focus, it is a good idea to keep colour to a minimum. If there is even the slightest doubt that you will be able to use a colour printer then I would do everything in black and white.
Embarrassing confession moment. This was my GCSE geology coursework. While the content was actually alright, the design is plainly awful for so many reasons. The most obvious one is the orange gradients on the tables.
The scary thing was at the time I thought it looked good. For this reason I am begging you to stay away from gradients like that.
I think this is perfectly acceptable and wont give your teacher a headache.
This is how I do tables. I took my inspiration from this 24 Ways article by Mark Boulton and I find this to be the cleanest and most printer friendly way of setting tables. I highly recommend reading that article as it goes into so much more detail than I will be able to do specifically on the topic of tables.
As far as colour in pictures go, I would leave it there. Making pictures black and white can make the page look a bit boring, especially if you remove the colour and don’t up the contrast. If you don’t have access to a colour printer then make them black and white.
Colour can also be used for emphasis, red typically stands out strongly on a page and you don’t need much of it to make an impact, in fact too much can ruin the effect.
Blue can also be used for emphasis but because it recedes from the page you can use much more of it, but still use in moderation.
Yellow is far too pale to use for emphasis, make sure that whatever colour you use it is dark enough to be able to see it easily. Unless you have a good knowledge of colour theory I would stay away from using large amounts of it in your essays and don’t use colour for emphasis if you don’t have access to a colour printer.
By making things look simple you aren’t removing the design, just designing it to be functional, which is ultimately the most important thing where an essay is concerned. However, if you’re really feeling creative and you have a good knowledge of Photoshop or similar then you could have a go at producing something like this:
Again, only use in moderation, the less frequently you use something the more impact it will have. Also make sure you have a good reason for styling that paragraph so differently, again it all comes down to setting your content in such a way that it gets the best attention in the right places for the right reasons.
