Our first topic is…drumroll please: Why Word isn’t a design program.
For most people, it’s tempting to use Word for many different business needs, and it’s certainly cheaper. But yes, I can tell at a glance when someone has used Word. I actually did this for years before I became a professional designer. And I, like so many other consumers out there, absolutely judge a product or company based on their presentation. It’s hard to take a business seriously when they don’t take themselves seriously enough to look professional and pulled together. Word isn’t a design program. Professional designers don’t use Word for design because it is inferior for that purpose. Graphic Designers use specialty programs, primarily Adobe products. Unfortunately, Adobe is expensive and requires a lot of specialized training and knowledge.
There are actual reasons you shouldn’t bother using Word for brochures, flyers, business cards, ads, letterheads, or social media. Here’s a few of the big reasons.
For starters, it’s called Word.
It was programmed and created to be used for words, as a replacement (and upgrade) from other text-based computer programs, which in turn replaced typewriters. Yes, it has some design capabilities, but those are meant to be small-scale enhancements for the lay user, rather than the purpose of the program. In fact, within the Office platform there is even a design specific program for graphic layouts to use instead of Word (this is an entirely separate blog as to why it is not an ideal or professionally used program).
Layout & Alignment
Have you ever tried to put a picture in Word and spent waaaay too long trying to get it the right size, or lined up somewhere it won’t go, or tried to get it to somewhere else and it just won’t do what you want? Or found some complicated work-around to make it do almost what you want? That’s because it’s not meant to do it. Sure, you can find a way to make it sort of work, but it isn’t meant to be a design program. Making things go where you want them or lining up with other things (text or images) is hit and miss. Not to mention the tinkering and effort it takes if you want two different things to be the same size and shape. Professional programs are meant to handle these requests.
Visual Quality
I’ll skip the technical speak here, but the bottom line is that text programs aren’t meant to hold and display high quality images. Images can get easily distorted or degraded in them, file sizes are huge, and in printed versions you can easily see the difference in quality.
Design programs have specialized ways of handling large images that prevent loss of visual quality and consistency, and allow designers to produce different formats for different uses. For example, the file you use on a screen isn’t the same as what you would print at home, which isn’t the same as what you’d send to a printer for a professional looking result. Have you ever noticed a flyer or an image online that look fuzzy? That’s caused either by producing the image in the wrong program (like Word) or using the wrong format for the purpose. (We’ll delve into this again in a future blog.)
Special Features
Word has some nifty tricks these days, but they are the tip of the iceberg in the graphic design world. There are lots of features and subtle effects that make a big impact that you can’t get in a word program. This is true of not just images, but text as well. It is far more time consuming to layout a long block of text for a book or brochure in Word than in a professional program. Design programs allow for not only large-scale consistency and design but can make it easier to edit later on. For example, instead of copy and paste or hand editing letters at the start of a paragraph, a designer can set up parameters for the first letter of a chapter to be larger, or to insert a heading, or create extra space. This ensures a polished, consistent, professional looking product.
Quality Control
Set aside everything we’ve covered and assume that you have actually created a quality, great product in Word. Now you have to share it and send it to people. Here are two VERY common problems that then happen:
- You send it as a Word file (doc or docx) to someone. They may be is running a different version of Word (or who uses a different text file program). They may not have all the same fonts. Their program (sometimes even unbeknownst to them) automatically reformats certain settings on all files opened. The file they see is no longer the perfect file you created. You cannot ever assume that someone’s view of a Word or text document is the same for another person, because more often than not, it isn’t.
- You save it as a PDF or JPEG and send it. Logically, this should be fine, but there are two common problems here as well. The first is that you cannot embed things the same way in these PDFs as you can with professional design software. This means even with PDFs, fonts morph and change and viewers may not see what you created correctly. I’ve seen this do some pretty bizarre things. With JPEGs, the quality is often so low that it looks fuzzy and hard to read.
Bottom Line
I get it. Word is cheaper and easier a lot of the time. But you get what you pay for, and most of the time, it’s worth spending the money to do it right the first time. First impressions matter, especially in business. If you have an event or a service you are advertising, spending some money upfront dramatically improves the impression you make. This means you are much more likely to gain more customers and clients and make more money.
Interested in reading someone else’s take on this? Here’s another blog article I found that echos many of my thoughts, but also provides some additional thoughts.