La Chiamavano Helvetica*

*They call her Helvetica.

What are the conventions of an instructional document? I've been showed how to write the instructions, I've learnt how to design a document, I've read Gagné's book about the principles of instructional design. But what about the style?

When I was writing the content for my team project, as I was the one who created the document for submission, I've spent a long time thinking of the style. My team didn't agree for a particular style guide, that's why I had to take time for it.

I applied the theories of "good style" in technical writing. I changed the typeface family from serif to sans serif. I don't know if my lecturer will print the documents when he corrects them, but as there are nine teams, that is to say nine documents, and they are pretty long, I guess my lecturer will correct the documents online. Therefore, I think a serif font suits more than a sans serif font.

The size wasn't a big issue. I chose 14 pt because 12 pt looks too small to me, because of the screenshots. Indeed, screenshots of YouTube are only efficient if we take the whole screen. Consequently, the pictures are huge comparing to the content, that's why I used a big font size for the document.

Also, a lecturer of mine said that black on white tends to tire the reader's eye. She said dark blue on white may be more efficient. I notice when I was at school, students were required to use the dark blue pen and not the black pen. There may be some connections by chance?

Even though I won't probably be graded on the presentation page, I know I must modify it to make it more attractive. For now, the presentation page of the project document is just composed of the title of the project, the names of the team, the module code and title, my lecturer's name and the date. As a kid, I used to put a picture on the first page... and it is apparently the convention for instructional document.

A few weeks ago, I watched the documentary Helvetica. It was interesting to see how a typeface is created. However, I still can't believe how some people can love a typeface that much, that they can spend almost two hours talking of it (her?) with the same passion. So, I decided to use Helvetica as font.

Unfortunately, Helvetica is missing in OpenOffice... and surprisingly in Word too!