Design

A still image from Design showing tabs for selecting Standard Templates, Personal Templates or Team Templates and a template document underneath.

Good design supports your message

Alongside carefully choosing your words and pictures, good design that reduces visual clutter and guides the reader through your document is one of the most important tools you can use when creating good quality Easy Read.

A group of people around a table are having a discussion, one person is making notes on a laptop.

Design functions in Photosymbols take the more time-consuming and difficult elements out of laying out your document, allowing you to focus on the quality of your message.

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A screenshot of a Design document in progress, the heading says 'Learning disability nurses' and has a picture of a nurse. Underneath, a textbox is active with some text and some buttons above for editing the content.

Software built specifically for Easy Read

If you’ve used a standard word processor to write an Easy Read document you’ll know that juggling pictures and text can be fiddly and often involves compromise such as using tables to get things in the right place. Graphic design software can get better results, but may be costly and involve a steep learning curve.

A screenshot of a search bar saying cafe, while underneath are images relating to cafe such as washing up, cake and a sandwich.

Our Design function was built for Easy Read, and is based on our team's extensive experience over decades of creating accessible information. It's geared towards making the process easy for you and accessible for your reader. Everything is customisable in a few clicks, and works alongside our full suite of features.

A screenshot of working in a Design document and choosing an image from a variety of images arranged under a tab called 'Favourites'.

Get the right image every time

Our powerful document creator is fully integrated with the classic Photosymbols image library. You can browse thousands of images relevant to people with learning disabilities. To speed up your workflow, you can easily draw on recently used images and favourites from our library.

A screenshot of Photosymbols' Picture Editor with one element of the composition selected showing a border for changing the size of the image and buttons for manipulating the image.

Good Easy Read is person centred and specific to the needs of the reader. Use our in-built Picture Editor to combine two or more images and create new meaning. Or you can use personal images such as logos or pictures of real locations, all from within Design Mode.

A screenshot from Design of a document with thumbnail images of each page.

Flexibility, variety and quality

Mix and match pages within Design to tailor your template to your needs. Our intuitive drag and drop function allows you to add, remove and reorder pages. Get templates based on our team’s decades of experience in creating Easy Read. You don’t have to be a design expert to get high quality documents every time.

A screenshot of a selection menu for different page types in Design.

With over 20 customisable page designs included there are endless combinations for quickly building your layout, and through our ongoing work with Expert Advisers we add new template pages whenever we hit upon something that we think you’ll find useful.

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A screenshot of a tab called Personal Templates with a template underneath for a work plan.

Quicker and more consistent Easy Read

Create templates for the documents you use again and again. There’s no need to start from scratch with every day tasks like appointment letters or reports. Choose whether to keep your templates personal to you, or share them across your team for a consistent approach to communicating with your audience.

A screenshot of a menu entitled 'Settings for "Appointment Letter" and showing options for showing page numbers, sharing with team and setting as a template.

You can share one-off projects with your team too, allowing colleagues to download them and use them as they are, pick up with editing where you left off or even copy them and use them as the basis for creating their own work.

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For a free, live demo on Zoom about our newest features, check out our list of events.

If you have questions or would like a free 24 hour trial contact us on ask@photosymbols.com .