Even if a lawyer thinks they are not creative and not a visual thinker, following a basic design process & using a toolbox can help them shortcut to good design work.
This section will go through those essential process, as well as the exercises & tools they can use to develop their own designer instinct. It will not happen immediately, but basic familiarity is useful and the more the lawyer practices communication design approach, the more quickly & effectively they will be able to create good designs.
The Core Process of Creating a Legal Visual
Exercises
Some exercises to do to improve your design instinct:
- Go on Pinterest to see others’ curations and to make your own
- Become a critic, see where the principles are in action and where they fail
- Use Microsoft Word & PowerPoint creatively, you don’t need expensive software to apply these principles
- Collect good examples of design — start a blog, a desktop folder, or a scrapbook with inspiration of good design work from the world of law and especially beyond it
Legal Communication Design Toolbox
Please visit the Legal Design Toolbox for a set of resources, links, tools to help you make great visuals. Here are some of the topics that the Legal Design Toolbox can help you cover.
How to use color: what different colors mean, how to combine different colors, Color hues and values, how many colors are too many colors, how to make a pallete, how to choose colors for your visual identity
Charts and graphs: which type of diagram which works for which type of information, how to make them look legible, what to do what not to do, how to choose between charts, pies, tables, pictograms, maps
Pictograms, cartoons and icons: how to present info through images, stay straightforward and not having images that confuse the communication, where to find good icons are, how to get the logo, how to use pictograms in the right proportion in your documents
Capturing Process: how to layout process for complex system in a clear and convincing way, what’s the best practices for laying out these maps are, how to get a group of people to collaborate to create these maps, how to make it into a digital form, how to put them on paper to be used in the off-line world, make them more usable to the person