Since this week's activities involve work on creating your technical marketing documents, it's important for us to quickly revisit last week's unit on document design. After all, although templates from programs such as Microsoft Publisher and Adobe InDesign offer professionally-designed documents that will allow you to bypass creating a professional-looking document from scratch, it's highly likely that you'll customize a template to meet your product's and audience's needs.

So here are a few things I'd like you to keep in mind, as you begin putting together your technical marketing documents:

Related chapters in our text examine a wide range of document design principles, as
applied to topics, writing situations, and target audiences. For this project, we also need to consider how best to use the technical marketing genre to meet the needs of a product, manufacturer, and audiences who are being asked to spend money -- in some cases, thousands of dollars!

Here's what's most important -- whichever document type (brochure, flyer, booklet, postcard, etc.) and document design approach you incorporate:

• Appropriate emphasis on the product/ manufacturer/audience
• Effective choice of document type for the product and for how your audiences will access and use the information presented
• Is the document attractive -- and does it "represent" the product
  and the manufacturer in a positive and consistent manner? Some manufacturers -- most notably Apple and Sony -- use page design, prose, or color-based "templates"
  to communicate identity through their documents.
• Appropriate accommodation for the document's life expectancy -- will the user spend a few minutes looking at the document while in the store, and then discarding it after buying (or deciding not to buy) the product? Or will the user take the document home, place it with documents for other or competing products, and conduct comparison research?
• Overall, is information arranged in a functional manner? This is especially important for brochures and other folded documents.

On Friday, we will consider issues related to production -- what happens when your technical marketing document moves from screen, to printer, to distributor, to target audience. Your goal: Ensure that what your document looks, reads, and "feels" like on screen effectively transfers to the printed hard copy -- after all, it's the printed (and folded/stapled) hard copy that your audience would access.

NOTE: Since this is an online course, you won't be submitting a hard copy of your document. Nevertheless, I would like you to work with hard copies of your document because again, this is what your target audience would access.