People who use Word to typeset aren’t typesetting, they’re typing. I’ve had to do more than my share of ‘Word-Projects’ where the client, for whatever reason, wants their projects completed in Word. It’s possible, albiet endlessy frustrating, to produce an InDesign/Quark-esque layout. It also takes twice as long and makes you feel as worthless as a peso in Mexico.

I miss my elements of Typographic style book. I remember it the way people older than I remember seeing Star Wars for the first time in ‘77. Grand, bigger than life, rich and vibrant and like a whole new world. In reality it was desaturated, had model planes flying around, and too much grain in the print. Every now and again I think about going out and buying it, until I realize it’s not as fun to read as I thought it was. But if I ever start teaching Typography, you bet your asses that’ll be required reading.

‘Till then, let’s all go do Powerpoints and Word Templates!

Probably the biggest fire that we’re fighting on this issue is how firmly entrenched Word is in almost every copy-editting environment and publishing environment in the world. Microsoft one-upped Wordperfect in earlier standards wars and made a word-processing program that was accessible and easier to use than its predecessors, firmly lodging it in most major businesses and homes before anyone knew what hit them.

Having worked with clients that require some version of what we’ve generated in a program format that they have the software / ability to revise and edit on their own, Word has also been a necessary evil to combat and always like designing with a typewriter and handcuffs.

As frustrating as it may be, this may simply mean that those of us teaching design might also need to address this concern and teach Word in a manner that allows students to take the helm and produce decent work with awkward tools. It’s widely unlikely that the collective woes of the design community are going to convince many clients to pick up a copy of InDesign or Quark and either learn it or teach it to their employees.

Aesthetically, most readers/viewers don’t even pay much attention to typesetting and only recognize that something’s off with it when something’s MAJORLY off with it (paragraphs inconsistently spaced, fonts that are especially impossible to read, punctuation in improper places, etc.), and if you can only barely get people to take a look at the Chicago Manual of Style or the MLA Style Guide, I’m afraid Bringhurst will simply remain on the shelf for most Word users…Especially if on-line guides discount his thoroughness as difficult and non-standardized. What a shame…

Again, Adrian, my goal isn’t initially to try and educate every Word user on the planet on how to acheive competent typography within a challenging, enigmatic, and often cumbersome program (though maybe that’s where I should set my sites and start reaping the financial benefits of seminars and workshops - “If Gutenberg used Word: Learn to use type like a master when using an apprentice’s tool”…I’ll have the sign-up site ready in about a week!), but it has to be a large portion of my goal as an educator to keep my eyes open for professional situations that may slip through the cracks and become a major headache for those I’ve trained when they face them.

Even as a very, very, very small design practitioner, I have about 40-50% of my clients demanding aspects of the work we’ve done together to be Word-friendly, and I’ve sat with them to talk about what fonts they have on their systems already that will work effectively with what we’ve created using fonts they don’t have available. I’ve had to get my hands wet and bang my head against several of the frustrations of using that software, but it hasn’t meant the client has then decided to quit using it themselves. It’s meant I’ve had to learn their territory and acknowledge that they may not come extremely far into mine in the process.

I think you’re also overexaggerating the effect of Word when you state that people look at the things produced outside of Word and consider them to be “wrong” - unfamiliar and very different, I’ll give you, but I’ve not found many who look at really excellent page design and say “That looks wrong” (unless it’s really a hack-job design to begin with - more often people are willing to tolerate lackluster design more readily than we are, which is the heart of our annoyance and umbrage to begin with!)

The truth is that most people reach for Word and clipart because that’s what they feel they are ultimately capable of both doing and using - they palpably know that they can’t draw, they can’t afford to and/or don’t know how to use the Adobe suite effectively, and they may not have the time or willingness to invest in learning and honing skills that they know other people possess (they may also be unwilling to pay for the usage of those skills, but that’s an entirely different concern). It really isn’t our purpose or our job to try and dismantle Word, Clipart, or any similar ilk - it’s our job and our purpose to take inadequate tools and resources and approach them “creatively”, which is to say looking at them not entirely as limitations, but simply as a more challenging set of choices / raw materials to work with.

One of the other major challenges that teaching presents to my understanding as a trained designer is taking a daily / weekly hard look at what I was really like before I learned everything I learned to get to the point I’m at now - I think you’re forgetting what your own skills and sensitivities to design were before you had training, Adrian. I can guarantee that all of us have term papers and presentations that we created quite a while ago that look exactly like what everybody else makes in Word, because we were doing it just like the majority of other people who use it: naively, insensitively, and without certain awarenesses.

Lose the piety and snobbery and share what you know minus condescension - it opens some extremely exciting doors and experiences…

You are absolutely right about me creating the same Word garbage as everyone else before I was a trained designer. For some reason you are picking up a condescending tone when I am just trying to analyze the effects of desktop publishing on our profession. The effects have not been good, and I blame the Microsoft beast, not the masses. I will never refuse to create Word and Powerpoint files for clients, but I will let them know it isn’t something we usually do because there are better tools for the job. Maybe you think that’s snobbery, but if we want to be focused on creating quality work, we have to avoid catering to mediocrity.

Paul, No apologies necessary. I hope you enjoy our discussions as much as I do. Part of the reason I take such an anti-Word stance is due to my disappointment with Microsoft in general. There isn’t anything stopping Microsoft from creating the best publishing software in the world. Instead, they dominate their industry with mediocre products that sacrifice integrity for sales. To expose my own hypocrisy, I am writing this from my PC using Internet Explorer. Go figure…

What I think people are missing here is that effective use of Word, or indeed Powerpoint, involves trained users working with templates, styles and layout rules just as much as use of Quark does.

In my experience Word can produce results appropriate for litho print for certain publications (generally ones which are text, data and chart heavy, and time critical). You can even script and customise the interface so your author has a toolbar with all the styles they need available with one click.

Sure it has some major limitations (RGB palette, clumsy text box system) but it might just be appropriate in the right circumstances.