As the global economy grows, designing documents for cross-cultural readers may be one of the greatest challenges facing technical communication. Today, most international readers are adjusting to Western design practices. But, with the global reach of the Internet and the growth of economies around the world, international readers are beginning to expect documents and interfaces to reflect their own cultural design conventions.

When designing cross-culturally, your first consideration is whether your document or interface needs a "culturally deep" or a "culturally shallow" design.

• Culturally deep documents and interfaces use the language, symbols, and conventions of the target culture to reflect readers' design preferences and expectations. To develop a culturally deep design, you probably need help from designers or consultants who are familiar with the target culture and understand its design expectations.

• Culturally shallow documents and interfaces usually follow Western design conventions, but they adjust to reflect some of the design preferences of the cultures in which they will be used. They also avoid any cultural taboos of the people who are likely to use the text. Culturally shallow designs tend to be used in documents or interfaces that need to work across a variety of cultures.

Unless your company is targeting its products or services to a specific culture (e.g., a nation like Korea or Zimbabwe), most of your documents or interfaces will need to be culturally shallow so that they can work across a variety of cultures.

Culturally shallow designs usually consider four design issues: use of color, use of people, use of symbols, and direction of reading.

Use of color—Choice of colors in a cross-cultural document can influence how readers interpret the message, because colors can have different meanings across cultures. For instance, the use of red in Japan signals anger, while in China red signals happiness. The use of red in Egypt symbolizes death. Meanwhile, the color green in France symbolizes criminality, while in the United States green symbolizes moving forward or environmental consciousness. Figure 10.23 shows how some common colors are perceived across cultures. When designing your document or interface, you should use colors that reflect the expectations of the likely readers (or at least avoid colors that have negative associations).

Images of people—Cross-cultural texts should use images of people carefully. Avoid big smiles, highly emotional expressions, suggestive behavior, and flashy clothing. In pictures, interactions between women and men should be carefully contemplated to avoid sending mixed signals. In some cultures, especially Islamic cultures, images of people are used only when "needed." The definition of "need" varies among Islamic subcultures, but images tend to be used only for purposes of identification.

Use of symbols—Common symbols can have very different meanings in different cultures. For example, in many cultures, the "OK" hand signal is highly offensive. Uses of crescent symbols (i.e., moons) or crosses can have a variety of religious meanings. White flowers or a white dress can signify death in many Asian cultures. To avoid offending readers with symbols, a good approach is to use only simple shapes (e.g., circles, squares, triangles) in cross-cultural documents.

Direction of reading—Many cultures in the Middle East and Asia read right to left instead of left to right. As a result, some of the guidelines for balancing a page design discussed earlier in this chapter should be reversed. For example, a document or interface that reads right to left tends to be anchored on the right side. Otherwise, the text will look unbalanced to a right-to-left reader.

Using the Principles of Design

Balance, alignment, grouping, consistency, contrast: These five basic design principles should help you create easy-to-read page layouts and screen interfaces that highlight important information and attract your readers.

In many ways, designing documents is like drafting the written text in your documents. You should go through a process—in this case, a design process.

Analyze readers and the document's context of use.

Use thumbnails to sketch out the design.

Design the document.

Revise and edit the design.

As with drafting, each stage in the process takes you closer to a finished document.