Fax Document Design

There are three main criteria you should adhere to when designing a FAX document to ensure your Fax is read:

  1. Ensure your fax document grabs the attention of the recipient by being succinct, avoid clutter by limiting verbiage, you have less than a second to grab the attention of someone reading your fax. If possible personalize your fax by including the recipients name also consider including a special offer, we all love a deal.
  2. Ensure your fax document doesn’t take forever to be faxed or consume large amounts of ink (these two issues are interrelated). Ideally your fax should take no longer than 60 seconds per page to be printed out on a fax machine, any longer and you’re sure to irritate people receiving your fax.
  3.  Ensure your fax document is legible and designed for fax. Most importantly, remember fax is a black and white medium. Design your fax document with this in mind. Most glossy marketing documents may look good when printed on a high resolution colour printer or as a .pdf file, but would be a disaster if faxed. Here are a few items which will help you design a document optimized for faxing :
  • Use at least 11 point type for text, anything smaller will not print clearly on some fax machine
  • Always use black text on a white background. Colour and gray scale text significantly reduces quality and legibility of your fax.
  • Avoid white text on a black or coloured backgrounds, this will force the receiving fax machine to use up lots of ink.
  • Use fonts that transmit well on a fax machine, and are easy to read. Use clean line fonts, such as Arial, Lucida Sans and Verdana. Do not use Times Roman.
  • Maintain font consistency throughout your document so that your message is clean and easy to read. Instead of using different fonts, change the size of your font and apply bold fonts on occasion to highlight important aspects of your message – always maintain a clean look.
  • Limit the use of images to black and white wire line images.Wire Line imageAll other images, particularly photo graphics, will look grainy, force the receiving fax machine to consume large amounts of ink and take a long time to receive – you are sure to upset a large proportion of your recipients with such faxes.
  • Avoid long vertical lines such designs force the receiving fax machine to scan very line and therefore take longer to send
  • Ensure there are no typos in your fax document

 Minimum Content Requirements

By Law your fax document needs to contain the follow information:

1. Senders Name
2. Senders ABN
3. Senders contact information (phone/mobile or fax or both).
4. A simple statement detailing how the fax recipient can opt-out or unsubscribe themselves from your fax list ( you have 7 days to remove opt-out requests from your list)

The following fax document breaks all the rules, DO NOT fax this type of document

yoga copy