Strategies for Long-Form Whitepaper Design

Tips for streamlining your long-form download design process.

So, you’ve just stepped out of a marketing meeting with a 20-page, single-spaced Word doc of your company’s best ideas and the directive to turn it into a downloadable whitepaper. Welcome to the world of whitepaper design.

Long-form content downloadables, usually in the form of a whitepaper, PDF ebook, or directory, make great offers because they can inform your leads about specific topics and establish your company’s industry authority. They come with their own challenges, however, since a whitepaper isn’t simply an overblown brochure, and the graphic design of a long-form download isn’t the specific reason your lead wants it. Your design work is there to make the text and information digestible and a visual delight to read.

So what makes for “good whitepaper design” and how can you simplify the act of turning that bland Word document into a visually appealing and delightful download?

Account for Likely Usage

For the most part, you should design a whitepaper with the primary idea that it will probably never be printed out, but that it could be. This means you should do two things:

1. Design for digital scrolling of single pages.
2. Design for the common desktop printer.

If you’ve ever opened a PDF on your phone that was designed to be viewed as spreads but is rendered as individual pages on the smaller screen, then you know the horror of cut-off images and confusing text flows. Even on a desktop computer, unless you’ve specifically set your PDF to display as spreads, the file will open as single pages that may or may not be zoomed to 100%.

Make it easy on yourself and your leads by considering each page individually. This also includes doing your level best to make sure that images referenced in the text appear on the same page.

When it comes to designing for the possibility, however slight, that your lead will want a hardcopy of the whitepaper, it’s useful to base all your design work on these guidelines:

• Most desktop printers can’t print bleeds, so don’t rely on that effect for your designs.
• Use contrast in your color scheme so that if the PDF is printed in black only, it’s still legible.
• Avoid wasting page space on non-useful content. Office managers don’t like paper hogs.
• Always include page numbers in case Janice from Accounting decides to make copies mid-printing and screws up the print order.
• Use the standard letter size for your country so that your lead isn’t forced to fight with the print settings dialog box to make it work.

Establish Readable Margins & Columns

I don’t know about you, but text that stretches across the entire width of the page makes me uncomfortable. I’m going to blame college essays for that one, but the reality is that most people prefer to read shorter text rows than longer ones. There is a balance, though. Four columns across a page are uncomfortable on the other end of the spectrum.

A grid system should be established on your pages to create a comfortable width for your text in either a single column or if you have a lot of text to serve up, two columns. Pull the text away from the edges at least 3/4" and leave breathing room at the top and bottom of the page so that the reader’s eye doesn’t freak out about how much text you’re expecting them to digest on a single page.

Use the probability that the whitepaper won’t be printed to your advantage by not worrying overly much about length. Higher page counts can even be an asset and selling point for the offer (“This comprehensive 42-page guide is loaded with all the advice you need to….”)

Determine How You’ll Integrate Images

The thing that differentiates a designed whitepaper from a standard document is the inclusion of valuable and informative images, figures, illustrations, and charts. (If your whitepaper doesn’t have these things, reconsider this format for your offer. Perhaps a video or slide deck would be better.)

This is why a grid layout is your ally in long-format content design. I find that I usually end up with three standard image widths that are able to handle all the types of images or diagrams I’m including.

• A full-width “hero” image for things I’m adding for their aesthetic qualities (such as a section header or to end a chapter).
• A roughly 1/3 page-width image for examples or images referenced or related directly to the text on the page. The exact width of these images depends on my grid and text column width.
• A roughly 2/3 width inline image for tables and charts that are necessary for understanding the text. Again, this sizing is finessed by my grid layout.

For all images, use text wrap settings. One of the worst things you can do to yourself is to believe you have your layout perfectly fit to the page only to discover that you accidentally concealed a chunk of text behind an image.

Use Master Pages to Shortcut Page Layouts

If you know you’ll want the same content on every page (like page numbers or the whitepaper title), then utilizing the Master page template is a no-brainer. But don’t forget that in more robust document software like InDesign, you can create multiple masters as well as blank masters for various types of pages.

Use the master page to establish your grid guidelines and to cut repetitive design work out. Using the same graphic on all your chapter start pages? Set that up in a master. Using a different footer on odd pages than even? Set that up in a master spread. Need a distinctive content grid for chart pages? You get the idea.

Set Up Paragraph and Character Styles

For the moment, I’m going to assume that you know the basic principles of not overloading your designs with too many or terrible font choices. This is especially true with long-format whitepapers with several pages of high-quality text content.

Besides that, however, do yourself the enormous favor of utilizing your software’s Styles options. Setting up custom character and paragraph styles for your document (and making sure you use them) means that if you decide halfway through designing things that your sub-headline style or the caption font simply doesn’t work, you can change that in one place. Otherwise, you’re scrolling through your content and changing each instance manually, and do I need to tell you how much that increases your chance of making completely avoidable errors?

Use styles to format headings, body text, bullet lists, hyperlinks, and anything else you can think of when it comes to reusable text formating.

Use Page Sections to Build a Table of Contents

If your software allows you to create sections in your page numbering, take the time to figure out how that works. This is useful for two big reasons that matter for document usability from your lead’s perspective. First, it allows you to easily build a table of contents using autonumbering. Second, you can use sections for bookmarks in your PDF, which is particularly handy for longer content downloads.

Pagination and section breaks can be trickier technical details that are a pain to set up, but if you can use the page numbering features of your editor, that saves you the later embarrassment of realizing you forgot to re-number your contents page after adding that one image that threw all the pages after it off by one.

Every Page Needs to Earn Its Keep

Once you have your content in place, review your document for gratuitous elements. As much as we enjoy a bold abstract graphic element these days, if it isn’t serving some purpose, or worse, if it’s stealing space from your content, ditch it.

If you have a mostly blank page in some mistaken idea that it will make two-sided printing work out better, refer again to my guidelines regarding designing for single pages, not for spreads.

Your leads want the information in your whitepaper, not your design around it. Make no layout and graphic choices that don’t assist them with reading the text or understanding the images, and don’t make them scroll past (or print out) barely used pages to get to the stuff they care about.

Designer Inbound is dedicated to guiding graphic designers and content creators through the principles of designing for inbound marketing content.