The essence of contract design is to clarify the message of the contract and to make it more understandable to both parties. By no means does this solely mean word formatting, but also the use of visual elements such as timelines and charts. The goal of contract design is to produce understanding, not just text or images.
Visualisation has been studied extensively and the results clearly show that it helps to illustrate and convey information and makes the information visible and understandable. When a person sees an image, the message is conveyed more effectively than with plain text. According to Haapio’s experience, it works best to use both text and an image together. Already Benjamin Franklin stated that pictorial language is a universal language and is primarily better understood than words, no matter how the text is worded.
In Haapio’s opinion, lawyers could start using more images in contracts. People are accustomed to visualisation elsewhere, but perhaps not yet in contracts. However, visualisation is only one tool of design and is by no means a synonym to design patterns and other means that contract designers have. To create a usable and user-friendly contract, a lawyer must consider several structural aspects. For a contract to be functional, the language should be clear, meaning that the vocabulary, structure and formatting of the text should help the reader find the information they need, understand it and use it. It is not just a question of sentence structures or comma places, but much more.
In our Academy, Haapio gave plenty of tips on where to look for help with design. Thanks to the Internet, ideas and help are easily and widely available. Haapio has, for example, co-produced a contract design library for WorldCC with Stefania Passera. The templates are not meant to be copied, but instead used to find ideas and inspiration for how contracts could be formulated so that they work in the field where they should be complied with. Many style guides are also available online and Adobe, for example, has published its own guidelines. There is also a lot of literature on the subject, to which Haapio has greatly contributed.