Finamore Design

It seems that every­time I turn around I run I am bom­barded by infor­ma­tion in 3′s. I started to real­ize it when I was rewrit­ing my company’s mis­sion state­ment. My three main objec­tives as a com­pany it to deliver every project

1. On Time
2. On Bud­get
3. Above Cre­ative Expectation.

Shortly there­after I real­ized that most of my clients want me to meet a triple bot­tom line. That is to say, every project needs to be:

1. Good for Business
2. Good for the Environment
3. Good for the Community

When ask­ing them to elab­o­rate on these cri­te­ria, again there are three points for each:

Good for Busi­ness means it must:

1. Increase Rev­enue
2. Build the Brand Image
3. Reduce Pro­duc­tion Costs

To have a pos­i­tive impact on the envi­ron­ment I must make sure to

1. Reduce Waste
2. Recy­cle excess materials
3. Reuse exist­ing materials

and to be good for the com­mu­nity I must

1. Pro­mote Moral Standards
2. Dis­play Eth­i­cal Behavior
3. Fos­ter Edu­ca­tional Properties

Whew! That’s a lot to think about, let alone live up to when design­ing an infor­ma­tion brochure or a piece of pack­ag­ing design.

So when I accept the job and am ready to put together the con­tract, inevitably there are three major points every client needs adressed in the contract

1. Cost
2. Time
3. Qual­ity

Then I remem­ber read­ing a sta­tis­tic about reader’s infor­ma­tion recall when applied to bul­let pointed lists ( sorry, I do not remem­ber the source, please let me know if you know it). The opti­mum num­ber of bul­let points to list is five. More than five an d the list looks too long and most peo­ple will not even begin to read it, less than five and it appears as if you do not have enough infor­ma­tion and there­fore the con­tent is incon­se­quen­tial and sub­se­quently unread. I know, I started with 5, but here is where the 3 comes in. Peo­ple only remem­ber the first two and the last bul­let point. Show them five and they will remem­ber three. (What do you do if you have less than five points? Write a short para­graph or put the info into a sentence.).

Do you have more threes you come into con­stant con­tact with?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.