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My understanding of Viv's request is that she's asking for design
help, not tool recommendations.
The best bet would be to collaborate with the designer who did the
covers, to come up with a design for the interior of the document that
can be accomplished with the available tool (Word). The designer knows
what looks good, and you know what the tool can do.
If you have no more budget, and must put on the graphic designer hat
yourself, one place to start is:
Fundamentals of Document Design for the Technical Writer
<http://www.bastoky.com/docdesign_home.htm>
However, unless you have a good eye for design, you may still end up
with something that "looks like a Word document". So if the company
really wants to compete with "big multinationals", this is not the
time to use an amateur designer.
--Janet
On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Ken Poshedly <poshedly -at- bellsouth -dot- net> wrote:
> Uh-oh. And now the fun begins and the preferred favorites are listed (shouted).
>
> Speaking for myself only, it's FrameMaker all the way.
>
> -- Ken in Atlanta
>
> ________________________________
> From: Viv Crawford <viv_crawford -at- hotmail -dot- com>
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Sent: Tue, May 18, 2010 11:32:08 AM
> Subject: Page layout resources
>
>
> Hello
>
> We're looking at publishing a suite of marketing and pre-sales docs that need to be as flash as anything the big multinationals we compete with can produce.
>
> We've had front covers professionally designed, but the pages with actual content on still just look like Word docs. (Word docs with fancy, coloured headings, but Word docs all the same).
>
> As Word guru in residence it's fallen to me to stop the Word docs looking like Word docs.
>
> Do you know of any resources for learning how to do page design *for printed docs*? Or any tips? Or publicly available examples I can be inspired by? I've tried Google but found only resources for designing websites.
>
>
>
> These docs will likely be distributed as PDF so my constraint would be that I'd have to stay within the ballpark that would allow DIY printing.
>
>
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> V
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