The design of high-stakes career materials

Certainly, you have heard this before, “Know your audience.” Candidates can easily lose sight of this advice. They work harder on summarizing their career achievements without thinking about the specific tasks of the reviewers. As a result, the candidate spends a considerable amount of time narrating the CV. This type of narrative is typically not useful for the reviewer.

An ideal starting point for writing your statement is to review exact instructions that are given to the reviewer when they agree to the role. The instructions are not confidential documents, so be sure to request a copy from the person in your academic unit that coordinates the review process. These instructions can serve as a guide for structuring your statement. This does not mean converting the reviewer’s instructions into a statement outline.

Candidates need to ensure their promotion statements are informative and convincing. A natural tendency exists to provide a comprehensive summary of all achievements consistent with the adage, leaving no stone unturned. This strategy does not fit with the reviewers’ task. Drawing on the works of Eams, ask yourself, “How can I arrange the statement in such a way as best to accomplish this particular task?” This question is important because it moves candidates away from narrating accomplishments to focusing on the specific information needs of the reviewer.

While reviewers are experts in their areas of study, they are also human with natural limits in their ability to process and remember information. How you present information profoundly affects how those details are processed and recalled. Overly detailed statements are challenging to read, and significant achievements can be easily lost. Bolding, italicizing, and underlining don’t solve this problem. In fact, when used improperly and excessively, these typographic cues can interrupt the flow of natural reading and add unnecessary complexity.

Donald Norman’s influential book, The Design of Everyday Things, has excellent guidance for thinking about short-term and long-term memory. He emphasizes that not all designed things have a physical structure, providing examples of how design applies to things like services, lectures, rules, and procedures.

“When done well, the results are brilliant, pleasurable products. When done badly, the products are unusable, leading to great frustration and irritation. Or, they might be usable, but force us to behave the product wishes rather than as we wish.” -Donald Norman

Excessive and improper use of typographic cues can easily make a document look ugly. Of course, the content of the statement is paramount. But, aesthetics matter. Abhishek Chakrborty has an excellent post on the Aesthetic-Usability effect, where he talks about how aesthetics affects perceptions, judgments, and emotion. Don’t over-interpret these comments on aesthetics by rushing to the widely popular design software to prettify your statement.

Good design cannot compensate for bad content. Focus all of your initial time developing and organizing your story. Do not let yourself get distracted with the different design choices as you are generating your content. When you have everything in place, you can apply explicit styling rules that visually reinforce your content’s organization. No doubt you will iterate between revising content and formatting. But, wait until you have a full working draft.

A common problem with statements is inconsistent use of formatting, especially typographic cues. Statements littered with bold, italics, and underlined text, as a way to emphasize details that they want the reviewer to notice and remember. The meaning and purpose of the typographic cues are often crystal clear to the candidate but can be confusing and distracting to the reviewer. They also make the document look ugly.

Typographic cues can be effective when they have a single function, are intuitively meaningful, and contrast with other text. For example, in academic documents, headings are almost always in bold. The reviewer will already know the meaning of this cue, so use this to your advantage. When you have a meaningful heading in bold, the reviewer can use the typographic cue to quickly scan the document for specific information.

Question: At the beginning of this section, I emphasized words and phrases using bold and italics. Do you remember everything I emphasized? Was the rationale for my emphasis intuitively meaningful?

Typographic cues lose their potency when they are used for another purpose, like emphasis. Now, the bold text has multiple meanings — that is, for organizing content and emphasizing content. The problem worsens when you introduce yet another cue for emphasis (e.g., bold or italics) or combinations of typographic cues (e.g., bold with italics). Too many cues interrupt the natural flow of reading. Cues require mental processing, and increase the cognitive load for the reviewers. Imagine yourself reading a document constantly hearing, “Pssst, pay attention to this, and this … and this, and especially this.”

The best strategy for making important details stand out is to exclude unimportant details from your statement. Separate the signal from the noise. I don’t take the extreme position that explicit strategies for emphasis should not be used. Rather, I’m suggesting that you use cues judiciously and consistently. You can accomplish this by creating an explicit style guide — that is, a set of rules that precisely describes the way in which the text is visually rendered.

“Good design, when done well, should be invisible.”

– Jared Spool

The following example follows styling rules that you can use as a starting point for developing your own. The remainder of this article will discuss the rationale behind these rules. These rules are specified in a way that I think promotes consistency and visual contrast.

You want to make sure your rules are simple and intuitively meaningful — don’t make the reviewer make guesses about the instructions you give by using these different cues. I suggest that you do not use underlining, as this cue is reserved for web links.

The suggestions that follow reference this example and provide a rationale for the rules.

Headings are probably one of the most critical typographic cues in your statement. Headings help structure the document, organize information, and make the statement more readable. Headings also provide logical breaks in the text, allowing reviewers to take a break and easily pick up where they left off. Give them an opportunity to take a break.

Again, the actual content is more important than the formatting and styling, so make sure you are thoughtful in your phrasing. When you are ready to style the document, you need to ensure visual contrast between the levels of headings and ensure the formatting choices are not the same as other typographic cues. For example, consider the following example showing level-1 headings, level-2 headings, and emphasized text. All three elements have identical formatting, so you are requiring reviewers to figure out the differences in their meaning when they should be focusing on the content.

This problem is solved by ensuring the cues are visually distinct. The following styling strategies are inconsistent with the styling rules of journals and grants, but those styling rules serve a different purpose. If you make the statement look like a journal article or a grant submission, you run the risk of having it reviewed that way.

The styling rules I provide as an example use a strategy called font pairing. Specifically, I use a sans-serif typeface for the headings (Helvetica), and a serif typeface (Georgia) for the body text. The different use of typeface adds texture to make the body text visually distinct from the heading. I also make the Level-1 and Level-2 headings different in size (16-point font vs. 12-point font) and different character casing (all caps vs. title casing) to make them visually distinct from each other.

An additional suggestion for headings, don’t place them at the bottom of the page without a meaningful chunk of text. Headings do not serve the purpose of demarcating content if the content is not on the same page. Besides, headings at the bottom of a page look ugly. (Perhaps these should be called tailings?) Related, avoid having short segments of text broken up by headings. Short segments of text are a sign of structural problems in your statement — either you have too many heads or are using too many levels. Strive for a simple hierarchy of text that you can easily follow.

Pairing Helvetica with Georgia is a safe choice based on recommendations from the design community, but other pairings work well. If you want your statement to look like a middle-school science fair project, go with Comic Sans and Papyrus. But, if you want to achieve a professional look, don’t make guesses — do your research. Your decisions can give an effect like pairing orange juice with toothpaste.

Documents can look very clean and elegant when full justification is applied to the text, assuming the text has been professional typeset. Professional typesetting addresses all the strange and unnatural gaps that occur when you use full justification using procedures called kerning and tracking.

Unless you are using a typesetting system like LaTeX, save yourself the hassle and use left-justification (also called ragged right). Left-justification is a standard recommendation in user experience — user interface (UX-UI) design if the text is not professionally typeset.

One of the most common questions about writing promotion statements relates to length — How many pages should I write?” The length of your statement needs to be considered in the context of your reviewers’ task. I don’t have any specific numbers to offer. Actually, I think this is the wrong metric to use. When limited to a specific number of pages, a tendency exists to see white space as an opportunity to squeeze in more text. But, white space is important for creating a visual hierarchy of text and makes the document more readable. Avoid reducing margins, indentations, font sizes, line spacing simply to fit in more text. If you trying to impose a boundary, focus on word count. Word count is a more direct measure of the amount of text.

Citing your own work in your statement is perfectly acceptable. In fact, you certainly have citations throughout your document. But, a problem emerges when candidates use an excessive number of citations to visually emphasize productivity. Sometimes the citation strategies offer no informational value to the reviewer. For example, if you are discussing your research supported by federal grants, reviewers do not need the unique numeric ID of the grant in the text. If they really wanted the ID, I am confident they could easily find that specific piece of information in your CV.

Excessive citations make the statement more difficult to read. If you have a collection of works around an important discussion point, consider using a bulleted list that contains information that is necessary to make the point. If you make your statement look exactly like an article or grant, you run the risk of having them evaluated that way.

You can use figures, charts, and images in your statement. But, carefully assess their information value. Never leave reviewers wondering, “Why am I looking at this?”

If you decide to use a figure, be sure that the purpose and information you intend to convey are clearly understood. Actively seek out a critical appraisal. Try to find out how other people interpret the figure. This is especially important when you have a conceptual diagram with lots of moving parts. A figure may be perfectly clear to you since you are the creator. But, remember your audience. Conceptual diagrams with arrows, shapes, and texts may be easy for you to understand but look like a plate of spaghetti to your audience.

When using figures, avoid the text wrapping features that your word processor offers. This space-saving strategy can interrupt the natural flow of reading, requiring the reviewer to read around an image. Give your figure room to breathe. Also, make sure you use the highest image quality for your figures. Nobody wants to spend time looking at a figure that is fuzzy and pixelated.

Color can be used to visually emphasize content, contribute to visual hierarchy, and improve aesthetics. But, using color in promotion statements is risky for at least three different reasons. The first reason relates to accessibility. Approximately 1 in 12 people born with one X-chromosome are colorblind, whereas 1 in 200 people born with two X-chromosomes is colorblind. If you cannot see the number 74 in the following image, you may be colorblind. Alla Katsnelson has an excellent article in Nature on fixing figures and choosing color palettes to make images more accessible.

The second reason is when the figures are optimized for electronic reading without considering what the statement may look like when printed. Even if your materials are sent electronically, be sure to carefully examine the appearance when printed on a typical black-and-white office printer. And, third, color has different cultural encodings. How you want your use of color to be interpreted may not be the way color is actually interpreted by the reviewers. Be aware of cultural differences and select color palettes that are neutral.

Color is a very complex issue in visual communication that requires a lot of careful thought. Starting with the color palette of your own college or university is a serious design faux pas. Those colors were selected for a different purpose, not promotion statements.

Using web links (URLs) in promotion statements is problematic. Many reviewers will print your statement, even if it is delivered electronically. Embedded URLs are completely useless when the document is printed. If your materials are sent as hard copies, do you really expect the reviewer to type in a very long URL to obtain the information? URLs can easily break or change. If the linked information is critical for the reviewer, then you should try to ensure the reviewer is provided with that information. Conducting a promotion review takes a lot of work. Avoid putting an extra burden on reviewers by making them retrieve linked documents.

Headers and footers are useful for information that you want to put at the top or bottom of every page. Page numbers should go in the header or footer, but nothing else needs to be repeated. Avoid adding clutter to the document with logos, your name or the document title.

Margins are obviously essential, but using them as parameters for your statement is arbitrary. What matters more is the line width, which is measured by the number of characters in a given line. For example, you can have a one-inch margin, but the amount of text between those margins is affected by font size, the amount of space between words, and the amount of space between the lines. This topic has received a considerable amount of attention — and, like the other design choices, no hard-and-fast rules exist. I think this StackExchange post has thoughtful and informative considerations on this problem. As one person notes:

“A good rule of thumb is to test the column width yourself. If you find yourself having to move your neck/head to read the text in a single column, then it’s probably too wide. Ideally, the reader should be able to scan each line just by moving their eyes. Of course, different media/devices are read at different distances, and different people may prefer different reading distances as well, so it’s not a precise science.”

You can write your promotion statement in whatever program suits you. Make sure to process the final document as a PDF to lock in the formatting. Carefully inspect the final PDF to ensure the page breaks are in the proper place and no leftover editing marks are in the document.

The main points from each section is provided here for your convenience:

1. Write for your audience, not yourself. Obtain a copy of instructions to reviewers.
2. Structure your statement in a way that has a natural fit with the reviewers’ evaluative tasks.
3. Generate your content first, and then format your document. Don’t get distracted with formatting when writing your statement.
4. Create an explicit set of rules to ensure all your formatting.
5. Check to ensure your typographic cues have a single meaning, have visual contrast, and are intuitively meaningful.
6. Use headings to organize your content. Ensure the heading contents are meaningful to facilitate scanning.
7. Headings should be visually distinct from the body test. Difference between heading level should have visual contrast.
8. Use left-justification (also called ragged right) to maintain natural spacing between words. Do not wrap text around figures.
9. Measure your statement using word count, not page length.
10. Use white-space to establish a visual hierarchy of your content. White-space can help make documents easier to read.
11. Avoid using citations to visually emphasize productivity. Use citations sparingly in ways that do not interfere with natural reading.
12. Use color cautiously because of accessibility issues, varying interpretations of the meaning of color, and loss of information when printed.
13. Web links — use at your own risk.
14. Process your final documents as a PDF. Check them carefully.