My company recently overhauled our employee review process, and the most striking thing about the change is the main employee evaluation document: What was once 4-5 pages of multiple metrics and ratings is now one single, well-designed 8.5 x 11 sheet. Our HR department reduced the questions and metrics, but in doing so has made the process far more understandable, focused and effective for all. One now has an instant birds’ eye view with one glance.
It’s human nature when producing an important document to think that more text will equal greater import. But all you have to do is look at three of the most famous “one-pagers” from US history to see that one page can communicate things more world-changing than any of us will probably ever create. The Declaration of Independence is a masterpiece of conciseness. The Gettysburg Address even more so (written at a time when 2 hour speeches were standard). And Richard Nixon’s resignation letter says exactly what it needs to, and not a single thing more.
People Are More Likely to Read and Use a One Pager
When I began my current job, I inherited a creative brief that was 3 pages long, with so many unnecessary questions that it was rarely filled out by account teams. In redesigning the brief, I insisted that it be no more than one page. The redesigned PDF form can now be filled out in a few minutes and gives a complete overview of a project with one glance—no flipping pages to have a question answered.
Even data dense documents can be reduced to one page. Thomson Reuters recently released a “one page” annual report. (Thanks to Ideatransplant for writing about this.)
It’s okay to broaden the definition of “one page” as Thomson Reuters does. The handout that Edward Tufte distributes at his seminars is a single, double-sided 11×17 sheet folded in half. I guess it’s technically 4 pages, but it’s still probably more effective than a 20 page booklet. (And probably more green and cost-effective).
Fix your Content to Fix Your Design to Fix Your Content
My screenwriting professor in college was a tyrant when it came to format. Standardization of font, spacing and margins is very important for film scripts for many reasons (one page needs to equal approximately one minute of screen time, for example.) But she was also insistent that no block of one character’s dialogue could span more than one page. We would get downgraded if we ever used “cont’d” on the following page. “Fix your writing to fix the format,” she’d say. It sounds crazy, but her reasoning quickly became clear. Long blocks of dialogue generally were an indication that we were not telling our story visually enough and were just overwriting our dialogue. To fix the formatting, we had to spend extra time examining every word and line, which always made our writing more efficient, direct and effective. I honestly can’t remember a time when fixing the format did not result in better writing on the page.
So, by fixing the content to fix the format, we ended up with stronger content.
Even in the context of a larger print document, it’s good to aim for one page segments. I just made some additions to the reading list page of a workbook I created. It took 20 minutes to get it back to a single page, but I think it was worth it.
Supergraphics
When discussing the philosophy of less is more, I always feel the need to bring up “Supergraphics.” These are a type of printed graphic which instead of reducing information, seeks to include as much relevant content as possible. Examples of supergraphics are train schedules or baseball box scores (or Tufte’s favorite example, Minard’s map of Napoleon’s Russian campaign.) What makes supergraphics different from essential one pagers is that with the former, the reader is generally interested in only one piece of the information—the 5:56 train home, for example.
But whether you’re interested in only a piece of information (train schedule) or the entirety of the information (employee review form), keeping to a single page drastically increases the effectiveness and the reader’s ability to process the information. All you have to do is think to the last time you had to use one of those large folded train schedules with the weekend trains on the back. Not as easy to use as it could have been, right?
