✪ Information Design: Stop Designing for Beauty. Design for Trust - #40

Trust-building via how you organize and present information to your readers

Trust isn't a commodity you can acquire or ask AI to generate for you.

Trust is a consequence of consistent actions, authentic interactions, and genuine value delivery.

My goal is to see more individuals thrive against the AI-assisted tsunami, not by leveraging pushy marketing tactics, frameworks and funnels but by learning how to build a trusted reputation online.

---

In this issue:

1) The Way You Dress

2) Designing for Beauty

3) Why Beauty Should Not Be the Goal

4) Who Do You Want To Please

5) The Books that Ignited my Passion for Information Design

6) Key Principles of Information Design

1) The Way You Dress

A key element in building trust is how you present the information you have and want to share with others.

Just like in the physical world, the way you dress and speak says a lot about who you are and what others can expect from you.

Likewise, no matter whether in a digital or physical format, the way you present information has a significant impact on how you’re perceived and how much your audience comes to trust you.

What I observe is that most creators, journalists, and experts believe they need to make their newsletters or web pages attractive and visually appealing.

But if your mission is to inform, share insights, and contribute new perspectives, your first concern should be to communicate clearly and effectively. Not to make things look nice.

Investing in appearances over substance does not lead to better communication. Actually can bring the very opposite results.

As an independent, self-sustaining digital author who has relied 100% on my readers for over 20 years, one of my earliest decisions has been to prioritize the design and presentation of information over its embellishment or decoration.

Unlike most authors who go out of their way to make their digital communication look “more attractive and engaging” by stuffing it and adding all kinds of visual elements, I chose to go after high readability, structure and navigation, rather than beauty.

2) Designing for Beauty

If you’re communicating with others, you need to design for them—not for yourself.

Each person has different tastes and preferences. What looks good to you may seem cluttered or unattractive to someone else.

Designing with the sole aim of achieving beauty, especially without extensive training or experience in visual communication, often leads to counterproductive results.

Instead of making your content look:

• Nice

• Attractive

• Impactful

• Colorful

• Visually original

.

Your goal should be to make it:

• Clear and well-organized

• Instantly understandable

• Highly legible

• Well-structured

• Navigable

These qualities have a far greater impact on your readers’ experience and their ability to quickly grasp who you are, what you’re talking about, and where you want them to go.

3) Why Beauty Should Not Be the Goal

To make written content beautiful, elegant, and professional-looking, you don’t need to aim for beauty.

Here’s why:

1. Beauty Is Subjective
   What’s beautiful to one person may be ugly or confusing to another. By chasing aesthetic perfection, you risk alienating part of your audience.

   .

2. You’re Not Competing for Attention
   Your readers are already on your page. You don’t need "beautiful" design to capture their interest. Instead, you’re competing with their time. Presenting information in a clear, organized, and digestible way ensures they stay and engage.

   .

3. Readers Want Information, Not Decoration
   Potential customers or readers aren’t looking for flashy visuals. They’re seeking specific information. The easier and faster they find it, the more likely they are to trust you. Overloading content with decorations, icons, and unnecessary elements detracts from your credibility.
   .

4. No Need for Flashy Tricks
   When content is well-organized and legible, no additional incentives are needed. If someone is interested in your insights, all they require are clear titles, intuitive navigation, and minimal distractions.
   .

5. Functional Elements Make the Difference
   Elements like white space, signposts, indexes, bulleted lists, visual maps, charts, and summaries enhance readability and user experience. These functional tools outperform purely aesthetic additions every time.

4) Who Do You Want To Please

In the year 2000, at the beginning of my career as a trusted guide for communication professionals, I was captivated by the idea of creating websites—information spaces with endless potential. I wanted to master how to use them for effective communication.

At that time, I was leading a digital communication training agency, working mostly with international NGOs. This gave me a treasure trove of materials to experiment with: course handouts, presentations, newsletters, reports, and multilingual books.

The challenge was how to structure and present information efficiently in a medium that no longer had the physical constraints of traditional publishing.

Questions like these consumed me:

• How should I format a page of text when computer screens had no standard size or aspect ratio?

• How could I present large bodies of information to make them easier to navigate and understand?

• How could I create a professional, elegant look without explicitly chasing beauty?

Most NGO officials in charge of publishing at the time produced materials that were hard to read, poorly structured, and visually unappealing.

PowerPoint presentations were especially infamous, filled with unreadable text, mismatched fonts, clashing colors, and poorly designed charts.

These were not products of expertise but of convenience: they were created because they could be, not because the creators knew how to do it effectively.

The result was materials designed to please the creators and their superiors, not the audience.

5) The Books that Ignited my Passion for Information Design

That’s when I decided to read and understand as much as I could about how to communicate more effectively all that information.

I fell in love with the art that explained it, determined to learn everything about it. I attended lectures, courses, events.

But the turning point, were a few key books which completely re-structured my way of looking at how to communicate visually while using text, images and illustrations / charts / diagrams.

These books have profoundly and permanently influenced the way I now look at visual communication.

• Dynamics in Document Design by Karen Schriver

• Prof. Edward Tufte books. (all of them)

• Clement Mok - Designing Businesses

• Jakob Nielsen
  - Designing Web Usability

• David Siegel - Creating Killer Websites

By reading these books, I realized that by strategically designing for the reader (and not for the author) and by organizing in harmonious order specific elements of visual communication it was indeed possible to reliably produce publications that looked highly readable and very professional.

I also became aware that while it is true that culture and personal history can influence a lot of what one comes to define as beautiful, it is also true that if we reverse engineer the elements that give life to that beauty we will find some key universal characterizing traits.

Information Design is the science that focuses on studying and analyzing these traits. It allows us to understand and adjust the way we structure, organize and present information, with the goal of making such information as readable, understandable and digestible as possible.

The result, are documents, books and presentations that look:

• Clean

• Orderly

• Easy to read

• Easy to comprehend

• Easy to navigate

These are universal properties, that are not subjective and that are shared by people of different languages and cultures.

Our focus should be then on understanding which are the exact variables that give life to such properties, so that by working on them we can drastically improve our effectiveness in communicating without searching for beauty.

By focusing on clarity, organization, and readability, we can create content that transcends subjective notions of beauty.

Clean, orderly, and easy-to-navigate materials naturally inspire trust and authority, regardless of cultural or personal preferences.

6) Key Principles of Information Design

Here the key information design variables that when properly applied to content, can transform for the better how readers appreciate and perceive what we want to communicate to them.

For each one I provide at least one simple tip to move from theory to practice.

1. Layout

   How the information is organized spatially
   Tip: Think of who and where will use your information and act accordingly (will it be on mobile, on a computer, printed? Will it be used at work, home, while travelling?) Leverage white space for clarity. The more space around an object, the more value and attention it gets. White space around any information creates a focused space for that info.
   .

2. Structure & Navigation

   How the individual content sections are organized hierarchically and how easy you can navigate them
   Tips:

   1. Provide a synopsis, an index or Table of Contents

   2. Put the meat of your content at the beginning.

   3. Help the reader see forest from trees - use maps and info-graphics

   .

3. Formatting
   How the textual information is formatted and presented to the reader
   Tip: Limit your line length to a max of 8-10 words per line. Limit bold to the first few words of key sections.
   .

4. Chunking
   How the content is broken up to make it easier to scan and read
   Tip: Break your walls of text into shorter paragraphs. Leave a blank empty line between them. Find out more about chunking.
   .

5. Loudness
   How specific content elements are emphasized over others
   Tip: To give more emphasis to something, do not bold it, color it or make it bigger. Simply reduce the volume / visibility of things around it.
   .

6. Minimalism
   How to use ink and pixels as efficiently as possible (Data-Ink Ratio)
   Tip: Do not add any “ink” that is not strictly destined to communicate something.
   .

7. Data-Visualization
   How rich and complex data can be presented, summarized and synthesized in visual formats
   Tip: Leverage tools like Napkin and Whimsical to support your texts.
   .

8. Labelling
   How precise information captions explain specific content objects
   Tip: Curate in detail your image and photo captions.
   .

9. Consistency
   How information design rules are consistently applied

   Tip: Use these information design principles across your communication channels. Consistent formatting across posts, documents, or presentations creates a professional appearance. Readers perceive attention to formatting as attention to detail, a hallmark of trustworthiness.
   .

10. Accessibility
    How to make information accessible for all kinds of users and devices
    Tip: Make sure your website/content is high-contrast and responsive so that it can be read on screens of any size.

By following the above principles and tips, you can significantly increase the scanability, legibility, and accessibility of your site content while giving it a cleaner, better organized and more professional look and feel.

Try for yourself and see the difference.

Then let me know what you have discovered.

Robin Good

---

Help Me Improve This Newsletter

---

How I Can Help You

• I analyze what you do and provide you with a report and recommendations
  (Audit) ($79)

  Critical analysis (20+ min video) of your site/landing page/newsletter/blog (choose one) pointing out limits and weaknesses while suggesting improvements, additions and changes

  .

• I help you define and improve your online communication strategy
  ($199)
  90 min - One-to-one private consulting session

  Focus on providing feedback to your existing online comm strategy
  after having reviewed your overall existing online presence
  (website / social / newsletter)

  .

• I work with you on a sustained-basis to improve your visibility, authority and content strategy
  ($580/mo)

  • Two private monthly sessions to review, assess, update and re-define your online content strategy to increase visibility, authority and conversions

  • Written monthly report with screenshots of your work and specific suggestions on where and how to improve

  • Website / social media / newsletter video audit

Follow a path with a heart.

From Koh Samui (TH)
Robin Good