I often tell about one of the first times I had to really think about the format of my deliverable. I had done what amounted to a market research report, but all I had was a lot of text. I spent a full day not doing the final formatting and design -- washing the dogs, pruning the roses, vacuuming the car... it wasn't pretty.
When the deadline was looming, I dragged myself back to my office, sat myself down, and spent 15 minutes looking for examples of market research reports on consulting firms' web sites. Pretty quickly, I figured out what was visually appealing to me -- lots of white space, color in the headings, lots of graphs and charts, and pull-quotes highlighting key points.
Once I had that ah-ha moment, I got to work creating meaningful charts, adding color to all my headings, added those pull-quotes, and making it look as appealing as I could. At that point, I could have stopped, spent another day busily procrastinating and worrying about whether the font color should be navy blue or midnight blue, whether Verdana is better than Candara, and comparing my format to those of 15 or 20 more examples. And I never would have gotten that report out.
As you think about what you could do to add more value to a project, remember that it doesn't have to be perfect. As long as you know that it enables your client to make a decision or take the next step, how you create your report is up to you.
Comments