Page limits—They’re a form of torture, presenting a seemingly unwinnable conundrum. Create a visually appealing bid, with pictures and graphs a-plenty—but risk culling valuable information to fit it all in? Or cram it edge to edge with densely packed text, and risk the ire of those poor evaluators doomed to wade through it?

Over the last decade, I’ve made the pursuit of page count perfection my personal mission. Achieving a balance of aesthetic appeal, readability, and an acceptable information density, can be broken down into the following key areas:

• Page layout
• Whitespace
• Readability

Note: The examples shown use a fictional Denyer Admin layout. When we do your bidding, we design around your existing branding, applying the guidance shown here while retaining your organisation’s look and feel.

Preparing your page

The starting point is to create a separate bid template just for questions constrained to a page limit. The first steps will include:

Narrower Margins: This will maximise available space, but beware: Some evaluators do still print bids to facilitate marking, and too tight a margin risks cutting information off. The safest bet? Stick with Microsoft Word’s Narrow Margins feature.

Reduced Header/Footer: Normally, it’s good practice to include a colourful header, featuring your company logo along with bid-specific information. But these take up valuable page real estate with limited benefit. So, reduce their size to occupy less of the page. You could relegate page numbers to a discreet box on the bottom right-hand corner. This puts it within the margin area, maximising space for your content.

Paragraph Spacing: Together with a page limit, your buyer has likely specified a font size, such as 11pt Arial. But few people know that you can fit more information into the page while still meeting those criteria. Enter: line height and spacing. To promote readability, Word defaults to a line height of 1.08 and a gap between paragraphs of 8 points. Reducing these pulls lines closer together while still meeting font restrictions.

WARNING: Note how readability begins to suffer the closer lines get. This limits how far you can go. At the same time, if you have one line which spills outside the page count, and you’re loath to delete it, then changing one or more of these settings by a few decimal points can get you back within the page limit without having to sacrifice content.

Judicious Use of Images: Images make documents easier on the eye, and a picture really does paint a thousand words. But where pictures are a salvation with word limits, they become a liability when space on the page is at a premium. This is one of the most painful aspects of writing to a page limit. Before inserting an image, consider:

1. Is this graphic essential?
2. Can you described it in words?
3. Can you shrink or crop it?

On this last point: There is a threshold beyond which shrinking an image further just makes it illegible. I recommend printing the document to check if you can still see the image properly. Ask a colleague’s opinion. If it’s illegible, then you have hit that threshold, and need to reevaluate points 1 and 2.

One last possibility with images is using your margins. You’re limited to using very narrow images which are not message-critical. This could include photographs from a case study or team member headshots.

Reducing Whitespace

After applying the above, we have already significantly increased the space available for our content. But patches of unused space still remain as shown in red in the image below. To put these areas to use, why not try the following:

Inline headings: You lose a lot of space when headings sit on their own line. In the illustration further down, notice the difference when we place headings inline as part of the paragraph they relate to.

Alternatives to bullets: After images, bullet points are the most page-hungry form of typography we could use. Just look at how much space they take up. At the same time, they excel at presenting information concisely, and serve to break up the page, improving readability. So you might baulk at the idea of removing them. The solution? Present them as either columns or tables.

Blocks of colour: Your paragraphs likely form different topics. If one topic is an aside, or you’re including a testimonial, why not change the background colour for that paragraph?

Use your unprintable areas for images: As discussed earlier, why not place some pictures in the margins? One option is to reduce the left-hand margin and increase the right-hand margin by the same amount. This shifts the entire page to the side, increasing the space available for visual elements. The content of some pictures will lend themselves to a horizontal or vertical aspect. This can determine where you put them on the page, whether the bottom margin or the side.

Columns: Newspapers have turned page limits into a veritable art form. Although the buyer determines font type and size, we can still learn much from these humble journals. One side effect of narrow margins is longer and wider lines. These can be troublesome to read. By presenting information in columns, newspapers allow readers to process multiple lines at a time, while also breaking the page into manageable chunks.

Sidebars: Another favourite of the newspaper. Sidebars are special boxes which contain additional information. In the context of a bid, these could be a testimonial, a description of a process, or some other side point you feel strengthens your case.

The Pain and Potential Gain of Page Counts