Making complex content easy and elegant.
Great content design looks attractive and matches your vision. But it is much more than just a pretty package: It’s crucial that your audience can easily find what they are looking for, and easily understand your material. We prioritize accessibility, ensuring that all users can seamlessly navigate and engage with your content.
We partner with you to match your style, tone, and brand book. We can bring an effective user experience to your project whether it is:
- A book that needs a clear structure with distinct head levels, sidebars, and images
- A report or presentation with hundreds of charts that needs to clearly convey key insights
- A website or app that needs organization and structure for a deep archive of diverse content types
Book design
SAMPLES
Project: The Pioneer Woman Cooks series (ongoing)
Client: William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Challenges: The beloved original blog uses a step-by-step format with a photo for each step, resulting in thousands of photos for a finite number of pages.
An extremely tight timeline means production usually begins before all of the content is written and/or photographed, making it difficult to finish these complex layouts on time while also filling the allocated number of pages.
Solutions: We developed a grid format for the step-by-steps, using the largest possible trim size. To keep these busy pages readable, we crop the small photos to be in scale with one another, and align them in a clean grid as much as the accompanying text allows. The book’s layout is structured so there are many full-bleed images to break up the density and intensity of the grid pages.
Working closely with the editor and production manager, we developed a book map system that allows for flexibility with the content still to come, but allows us to get started on these labor-intensive layouts ASAP.
These eight cookbooks (and counting!) have all been huge best sellers for HarperCollinsPublishers.
Project: The Kefir Cookbook
Client: HarperOne (an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Challenges: The manuscript had multiple types of sidebars that needed to be distinct yet similar, and many different elements like notes and tips in addition to the recipes.
Solutions: We designed the different sidebar styles to share the same thin frame and sans serif body text, differentiated by the typeface and color of the heads.
Color also helped set apart the two-part subtitle on the title page so it didn’t need to be broken into two separate subtitles.
We kept the typefaces to a minimum to keep the pages clean and easy to read.
Project: Bridges
Client: Black Dog & Leventhal (an imprint of Hachette)
Challenges: The challenge of this gorgeous art book was the very large, 18-inch trim size. It needed to be designed to shelve horizontally, yet still visually tie into the vertically-oriented cover.
Solutions: We designed the pages to feature a running foot and folio vertically aligned with the cover.
Each page shown here is a single 18-inch-long page, not a spread. The layout utilizes 4 or 2 columns for the text and inset images. We designed a grid at the top of each featured bridge spread to consistently display the important stats for each bridge, and a map to show where it is located.
Project: Power Souping
Client: William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Challenges: The author had clever “meal equivalents” that needed to read instantly, and many unique highly-designed elements and pages. Often the original content for a proposed spread was imbalanced, with a lot of content on the verso but little on the recto.
Solutions: We designed the unique pages with shared type and dingbat styles to give the book a cohesive look. For the “equation” spreads with a smaller amount of content on the second page, we either added running copy above or gave the shorter content a graphic treatment to fill out the page.
We set the nutrition information and the dietary restriction indicators in lighter colors to let the main content shine.
Content design began with books. We have designed and produced hundreds of books of all types, including lifestyle books, illustrated cookbooks, instruction manuals, and interactive publications. Our clients include most of the major U.S. trade publishers.
Reports & presentations
SAMPLES
Project: Strategy& white papers rebrand
Client: PwC
Challenges: When Booz and Co. was acquired by PwC, they were given a new name (Strategy&) and a new look. They were also given a firm deadline by which to re-do their hundreds of existing white papers in the new branding style. In-house and contract designers were given a ”template” and 240+ pages of branding guidelines to rebrand these reports, one-by-one. The rebranded papers trickled in slowly from the designers, and often did not accurately reflect the brand guidelines. When the deadline was about five weeks away, there were still hundreds of papers that were in danger of being pulled from the site.
Solutions: We began by spending a good amount of time poring over the new brand guidelines, in order to sift out the non-applicable. The ”template“ provided was actually just a sample that lacked parent pages and style sheets. This sample included elements that never appear in the real papers (such as dates) but lacked crucial elements that were featured regularly. It was no wonder they were having trouble. After successfully designing a handful of re-branded papers, we created a true working template and a how-to guide for producing them. We assembled a 6-person team to re-brand the remaining reports and finished them within one month. None of the content had to be pulled, and Matchbook Digital became the official design team for Strategy&’s editorial department.
Project: PwC white papers
Client: PwC
Challenges: Each PwC white paper needs to be on-brand and compliant with PwC’s 240+ pages of branding guidelines. Photos need to be sourced from their photo library or purchased from select stock houses within a budget. The charts often need changes to accurately convey the data at a glance.
Solutions: We designed this report (and many others) to fit with PwC’s brand guidelines. The images were sourced from their extensive photo library and the brand’s bold colors were alternated to hold the reader’s interest.
Exhibit 1 was laid out to distinguish the “global” data, so the reader can easily see how each region compares to it. We also made the other two exhibits in the report consistent with one another, for continuity within the design.
Project: Annual report
Client: CRE
Challenges: This nonprofit provides consulting services to other nonprofits to help them operate more efficiently and achieve their goals. Their annual report needed to reflect their branding guide, showcase their work and the people helped by these organizations, and accurately depict their annual numbers.
Solutions: We used one of their four brand colors for each section to set them apart, but also tie the whole report together. We chose photos from their archive that fit within each section, and kept them in scale with one another to avoid having the pages feel chaotic. Throughout, the organization’s bright colors were paired with neutrals so the data and content would shine without being overwhelmed.
Project: Pitch deck presentation (before-and-after)
Client: Appiphany
Challenges: This funding pitch presentation included an overwhelming amount of data and images on each slide. There was no consistent branding, and the messages weren’t clear.
This start-up created educational apps for children, and wanted the presentation to appear on a iPad.
Solutions: Working closely with the client, we distilled the main points for each slide and removed the redundant, distracting, and/or extraneous content. When needed, complex slides were split into two. We made the chart elements mathematically accurate (see slide 4), which made for a more impressive impact. A brand identity was developed and deployed that fit with the company, its audience, and its objectives.
We created the presentation as a working app, presented on iPads, complete with functional samples of the types of apps the company was developing.
We bring clarity to reports and presentations to ensure your messages are received. We have designed hundreds of white papers for Strategy& and PwC, annual reports, and presentations that inform and influence their target audience.
Websites & apps
SAMPLES
Project: CB5 website design
Client: Community Board 5 of Manhattan
Challenges: The website needs to display an enormous amount of content, both current and archived. This includes a calendar of events; meeting information and resolutions for a wide range of issues (such as zoning, landmarks, transportation, parks, public safety, and city services); and resources for different types of visitors. Their diverse visitors include individual residents, business owners, elected officials, and property developers — who all need to find the information they are looking for easily and quickly.
Solutions: We designed each of the seven main menu sections to each have its own “spot” color from the lively palette (all the heads and frames in the Calendar section are blue, all the heads and frames in the Committees section are orange, and so on) to help provide a sense of place within the content. We added search functions throughout (in the main menu, “find out how to…” links sidebars, as well as a robust search tool for the large Resolutions archive). We made to sure to include section landing pages for each section, rather than linking to the first item in the secondary menu which can feel disorienting to users.
Project: Practice test app
Client: Kaplan Test Prep
Challenges: The app needed to work for all of the many types of exams for which Kaplan offers test preparation. These tests vary greatly in terms of structure, question type, and timing. Some, such as the NCLEX for nursing, are adaptive and serve up different questions depending upon the answers given so far. Some tests needed to offer hints. When giving results, the app needed to offer specific feedback for wrong answers.
Solutions: Working closely with the in-house team, we approached the app test-by-test. After successfully designing a working prototype for the first exam type, we conducted focus groups with real Kaplan students. We tweaked and added features based on their user feedback, then moved on to the next test in the queue, adding in various new features as needed (timers, sections, hints, graphics with questions, feedback, and many more). Focus groups were conducted after each new test was added. After six or seven exams had been onboarded, the app was robust enough to take on most of the rest of the exam types with just a few tweaks.
Project: Rights4girls website
Client: Rights4girls
Challenges: The website for this small nonprofit needed to immediately catch the interest of potential donors, the primary visitors to the site. The photos provided, while important to include, were poorly lit and composed, often with fifteen or more people in the shot.
Solutions: We paired the organization’s powerful campaign tagline with a single professional image for the homepage, along with a row of impactful and meaningful statistics. We cropped and adjusted the snapshots so the subjects were in scale with one another and thus more visible, and added in a few professional shots for balance. We included bright pink Donate buttons in the header and the footer, paired with a call for action.
Project: Quick Draw app
Client: Northstar New Jersey, marketing team for the New Jersey Lottery
Challenges: The documentation for this keno-style game was confusing not only to players, but also to vendors and sales reps. This new app for events and promotions needed to teach everybody how the game works.
Solutions: First, we pored over the provided materials very thoroughly and carefully to learn the game. At the beginning of the “ticket,” we highlighted each question in order to gently guide the user through the selection process, step-by-step. When the “draw” button is pressed, an animation mirrors the real game’s televised animation selecting the twenty winning numbers. When the “See results” button is pressed, the user sees exactly how their initial choices affect the results.
Our web and app services always begin with the end user. We have designed and developed complete websites for nonprofits and start-ups, landing pages and modules for large organizations, as well as educational and other content-heavy enterprise apps.
