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International Karting Industry Buyer's Guide

GO KARTING!
A Guide To The World's Most Popular Motorsport.

Kart Expo International

Selling yourself to a sponsor is not much different than selling a product to a consumer. There may not be any hard and fast rules for designing your sponsorship presentation documents, but there are some considerations one must make when assembling the package.  The following are suggestions that should help you design for clarity and impact. 

1. Establish a format – An established format will make it easier for a reader to understand the points you want to make. A format keeps your reader from getting lost in the information. It will also set your document apart from others. You will want to plan your document before you begin. You will want to standardize your margins and organize your body copy into columns. Good document design is mainly a combination of common sense and keeping things simple. Be careful with the line length. Long lines of text are hard to read. Generally, a line should have 55 to 60 characters, or 9 to 10 words. A good rule of thumb when using justified text is that the line length in picas should be twice the type size in points. Left justification is easier to read and looks less formal than full justification (type flush left and right). Choose the one that matches the tine of your presentation. Graphs, pictures and charts add interest to your documents and clarify your text. Horizontal and vertical lines should be used sparingly to break up block of text. 
 

2. Use white space wisely – Don’t attempt to pack too much information or too many design elements into a document. The white space you leave can help increase the impact of your message. Too much information may distract the reader from the message you really want to convey. Give your graphics and type some room to breathe. White spaces can be used to emphasize your elements and help guide your audience through the design.
 

3. Use color to set your proposal apart from others – Color can increase the impact your document. Colored ink can highlight borders, rules or headlines. It can also be an organizing element used to departmentalize the document or to draw attention to certain areas. Even colored paper can have an effect on a reader, but use color sparingly. Too much color will cause it to lose impact. Color gains impact when used selectively. Bright colors indicate excitement and subdued colors can add dignity.
 

4. Choose the right typeface – Avoid using more than two type families on a page; one serif and one sans serif make a nice mix. Using the sans serif for headlines and the serif for body text is a common and familiar formula. Don’t underline text unless absolutely necessary. Avoid text in all capital letters.

Professional typographers use bold and italic type for emphasis within sentences – not underlines. Use bolds and italics sparingly; it is easy to overuse them and ruin the look of your text. Words in all capital letter are difficult to read and can be distracting; however, if very strong emphasis is indicted by the wording, i.e. “HELP!”, all caps may be appropriate. Don’t use all capital letters in headings unless in a slightly smaller size than the non-capitalized words around them.

Page layout programs allow you to modify existing typefaces by condensing or expanding them. As a good general rule, condensing or expanding the characters in a typeface should not exceed 85 percent. A higher percentage will cause the weight of the letters to be disproportional. Changes in the weight of the letters can become noticeable. Never compress or expand a typeface in order to achieve copyfitting. It is always better to use effective tracking and spacing techniques to adjust your column width than to play with the proportions of a font. Any extreme modification to the height or width creates a perversion of the font, which can become distracting to the reader. Most type companies offer condensed or expanded fonts if you find them necessary.
 

5. Be careful with the spacebar – The rules for typing have changed with the increased use of computers. You no longer hit the spacebar twice to add space after periods, colons, exclamation points, question marks, etc. You never use multiple spaces to align text into columns. The spacebar on the computer is a “variable” space, meaning that the width assigned to it depends on the width of the text around it. The computer will adjust the space for you. For example, justified text is achieved because the computer automatically varies the width of each space to force all the type flush against the right and left margins.

Most of us were taught in typing class to add a double space after periods. Fonts are designed with the letter pairs kerned, which means that when the combination of, let’s say a period and a spacebar are keyed, a wider space is assigned than if the space was between two letters.
 

6. Use tabs to position type on a line – Never use the spacebar to position type at a certain point on a line. Since the spacebar uses variable space, it may be difficult to align type from one side to the next because of the other text used in the line. Also, avoid using the spacebar to format paragraph indents or align columns.
 

NEXT MONTH – Six additional suggestions to help make your sponsorship document stand out!
 

Article courtesy of Insty-Prints Business Printing Services. There are nearly 300 Insty-Print centers throughout the country.

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