I was honored to be selected by a team at The Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP) (www.raponline.org), to be the designer for their “Clean Heat Standards Handbook.” At the project’s outset, the team coordinator had specific graphic design requirements. The handbook needed to be an interactive PDF with navigation on every page, allowing readers to easily jump to different sections. Given the digital nature of the material, it was crucial that the navigation solution was user-friendly in a digital format but would not print if a user chose to print the document. Printing the navigation obviously would have been useless as well as a big waste of ink.
To address the navigation needs, I designed a left-hand tabbed hierarchy of content. Each tab featured labels and icons, enabling users to find the information they needed from anywhere in the document. Early in the handbook, we included instructions on using the navigation tabs and an overview of the information structure. This ensured users could quickly grasp how to navigate the tool effortlessly. The navigation column was placed on a separate layer, allowing its printing property to be completely disabled, ensuring it wouldn’t appear in printed versions.
The handbook launched earlier this year in Europe and received great feedback. The head of heat policy in the UK commented, “I’ve had a read, it’s a great report and hopefully a blueprint for policy design.”
