By Daniel Maddux | Member
My battle
Paul and I were locked in our familiar battle. I had laid out the document using a clear logic, and everything made perfect sense. But that wasn’t good enough for Paul. He wanted everything to be pretty. And he was even willing to sacrifice a little clarity (gasp!), if it meant that the document wound up with the feel that he wanted it to have.
Why the ruckus?
Technical communicators tend to have very different priorities than illustrators, in general. Technical communicators are trained to make information work for people. Usability (not just for the Web) is the key. You analyze your purpose, analyze your audience, and then you put together documentation that makes complete sense.
Illustrators are different. They create art. The visual pizazz they add to documents is critical in creating top-flight documentation, but their focus tends to lean toward the art rather than the logical information that the art might be intended to convey.
Communicators and illustrators are just using different parts of our brains. But sometimes, because of poor planning and bad communication, technical communicators are pitted against illustrators. The situation becomes, at best, a stalemate, with both sides fighting for what they think is most important. The quality of the documents, and the users themselves, are caught in the crossfire. The users, instead of being treated like royalty (as they should be!), become refugees. The documentation winds up with about as much usability as a stream-of-consciousness journal, a twisted wreck of words and colors.
Ceasefire or strategic alliance?
So how do we deal with this divide? How do we set up expectations so that our forces don’t mutiny in the middle of the battle? Here are a few key tips:
- Get on the same page to start with. Make sure that the illustrator clearly understands what you want before they start working. While an illustrator may feel that following a preliminary mockup inhibits their creativity, that’s usually the route you want to take.
Also, your illustrator must understand the time frame and cost goal of the project. You don’t want to set them loose to create a graphic without providing specific guidance, or you’re likely to get an amazing, beautiful creation—just two weeks late and well over budget.
Getting on the same page on issues like these before you start will help you avoid nuclear carnage later on in the project.
- Be comfortable asking for changes. The illustrators you work with may be more temperamental than you would like. They may object to having their art changed after it has been completed (not that all illustrators are excessively emotional, but I’m dealing in generalities here). However, you have to be willing to desecrate their creation if it isn’t helping the document like it should.
This includes the times when the illustrator may have created something really nice, but it doesn’t match with company standards. You have to explain the standards clearly up front, and then ensure that they are adhered to throughout the project.
- Make a stand for usability. At the end of the day, the information you produce has to work for the intended audience. If the graphics and illustrations aren’t helping to achieve that goal, you’ve got to have the guts to make a stand. What’s most important is that it all makes sense.
- Recognize the value of the illustrator’s work. The way a document feels is extremely important. If you get on the same page ahead of time, and you ensure that the illustrations will be usable, then the graphics can raise the firepower of your documents to a whole new level.
And, as it turns out, illustrators hate mid-production changes just as much as technical communicators. A huge part of recognizing an illustrator’s value is making sure you have your guns locked and loaded before going out to negotiate. If you’re going to wind up changing half the content in two weeks, don’t ask an illustrator to start producing finished graphics tomorrow. Neglect advance planning, and you risk escalating the level of tension between yourself and the artists you’re working with.
Learn from my battle
So how did my battle with Paul turn out? Well, honestly, it was a rout. We weren’t on the same page to start with, and since I was a junior writer at the start of my career, and Paul had been around awhile, he was able to overcome my concerns about usability with his orations about the importance of graphics making you feel really good.
So how do you deal with situations wherein you don’t have control over the project? When an illustrator or graphic artist, who may not uphold the principles of usability, has the upper hand in making key decisions? Here’s how:
- Again, get involved early. Don’t forget about that Aberdeen Group report mentioned in the May 2007 issue of Intercom. Documentation projects are almost always successful if technical communicators are involved early enough in the process. Getting in the door early may mean that you have a foothold as you try to push back against ethereal information.
- Keep the usability of the information in the front of your supervisor’s mind. If necessary, involve your supervisor as a mediator in disputes with illustrators. Of course, this can be tricky if your boss is the creative director, and may tend to fall on the artistic side of the equation anyway. But your supervisor may just provide you with the necessary relief force to keep you from being overwhelmed.
Achieving victory!
If you can get involved early on in the project, set and manage expectations effectively, and avoid major course changes, your odds of a complete and total victory go way up.
Really, the battle doesn’t have to be between technical communicators and illustrators at all. Neither side has to surrender what makes them unique. If you learn to work effectively with these strange and powerful barbarians (from our words-centered perspective, that is), you can move from open warfare, to ceasefire, to strategic alliance.
At that point, you will have found a valuable ally in your battles against dense text, wordiness, ugly layouts, and poor usability. i
Daniel Maddux (dmaddux@elitedocumentation.com) owns Elite Documentation Incorporated (www.elitedocumentation.com), a technical writing company based in Houston, TX. Aside from researching how technical communicators can best meet their clients’ needs, Daniel enjoys his volunteer work and martial arts training.
