Well-designed documents get their readers to start reading and keep reading; poorly designed ones put potential readers off from even attempting to read. Effective design brings out the underlying structure of a document, helps readers to find information quickly, and highlights the most important elements.

This 90-minute webinar will sensitize you to good document design and show you how to avoid the most common typographical blunders. If you have ever agonized over which font to use, what info to provide in headers and footers, whether to opt for italics or bold type, and how to make heading hierarchies apparent without resorting to numbering, this webinar is for you.

Is typographic jargon keeping you away from using the increasingly sophisticated features that Microsoft Word offers? We'll go over vocabulary such as widows and orphans, fake versus true small caps, spacing and kerning, hung punctuation, and ligatures, and then discuss how to deploy these features to give a professional polish to your pages. We'll also deconstruct websites and printed documents that are a pleasure to look at and comfortable to use, identifying what makes them work and how to learn from it. You'll leave this session ready to craft engaging documents that show technical writing in its best light.

Yateendra Joshi (he/him) has been copyediting technical documents, mainly research papers in the biological sciences, for more than 35 years; has designed a range of products from business cards and letterheads to journals and books; and is a member of the editorial board, Information Design Journal, the Netherlands. Yateen was certified as a Diplomate editor by BELS, the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences, St. Paul, MN, for displaying exceptional editorial proficiency. He writes often on topics related to copyediting and contributes regularly to Editage Insights on topics related to academic writing. Yateen also conducts training programs for researchers and academics and occasionally for copy editors; is a council member of EASE (European Association of Science Editors) and a member of the board of directors, BELS; and has delivered several webinars as part of virtual conferences organized by ACES, the Society for Editing and Editors Canada. Yateen has also written on referencing styles for Science Editor, published by the Council of Science Editors, and for Medical Writing, published by the European Medical Writers Association.

This webinar originally aired on July 10, 2025.