“Document design is the field concerned with creating texts, that is books, pamphlets, posters and others that integrate words and pictures in ways that help people to achieve their specific goals for using texts at home, school, or work.”

It is the bringing together of prose, graphics (including illustrations and photography) and typography for purposes of instruction, information or persuasion.

• It should help people to learn, use technology, make decisions, and get their job done.
• It should enable people to use the texts in ways that serve their interests and needs.

Reader needs must ultimately drive the design. Document design is the act of writing and designing along with the skillful selection, structuring and emphasis of content with the reader’s needs in focus

Advertising design, on the other hand is driven by the organization and it's main goal is to promote specific goods, services, or a philosophy and it is generally directed towards a group, notably, consumers. It’s important to make that distinction, and to keep this in mind when designing documents.

Most organizations that need to produce documents, also need to have some identity and product recognition included into their documents. This can be done with subtlety and good taste, so that the reader is made aware of the product’s origin, without the corporate identity overwhelming the information that actually needs to be communicated to their readers.

From: “Dynamics in Document Design”
Karen A. Shriver
1997 by John Wiley and Sons

Because of documentation’s utilitarian nature, many people don’t realize that creating a good, usable document takes a discriminating eye and intelligent, deliberate design. The goal, when designing documentation, is the successful presentation of information and the design itself must by its very nature, be all but invisible.

The designer must be aware of much more than the obvious visual elements, such as type, spacing, color. He or she must also be aware of:

• Learning styles—making information accessible to a wider range of users.

• Physiology—a basic understanding how the brain processes information, how memory works, and other physiological functions that occur during the reading process.

• Psychology and perception—designing specific types of information which can be presented in a way that is fitting to the readerÕs perception.

The designer must put aside his or her ego for the sake of the reader, in order to create a design that is essentially invisible or transparent. The reader should not be distracted by the design, but should be guided by it. The information that the reader seeks must be delivered by an invisible hand.

Design is usually thought of as something that comes after the writing. In this scenario, the designer is under-utilized: he or she is generally regulated to a support role and asked to “pretty up” or add a bit of spice to the text. This causes form to be separated from content, and verbal expression is wrongly privileged over visual expression.