As part of our blog series based on this great panel – featuring WilmerHale’s Lily Brown and Edward Jones’ Keir Gumbs – here’s a blog that addresses the question of: “How much do you think about design when you draft? Do you rely on others more for that type of thing?”
Lily Brown, WilmerHale: If I had an artistic bone in my body maybe I could help more with design, but my expertise is going to be with the actual disclosure including what are the requirements. I know what different clients are doing so I can say to someone, “oh you know a lot of folks are putting this up front in their proxy summary or whatever.” I keep up with market practice.
I’m glad there are people who have the more design-related area of expertise so what I’m going to do is be focused on top of what the rules actually require and what I’m seeing in the market. There is deference for the company’s existing approach – “Do you want two paragraphs on this or are you a company that wants to have just the facts?” Deferring to that and then understanding that they’re going to fit it into whatever their overall design approach.
I’m always happy to work with folks who refreshes their disclosure design pretty regularly. There are people who are very good at that and I’m happy to work hand-in-hand and I always look at final drafts and make sure that that newly designed disclosures haven’t caused the story and the message to get lost in the process. But I do tend to rely on vendors for the actual design part.
Keir Gumbs, Edward Jones: I too have no artistic bones in my body, no aesthetic sense. So I’m with Lily on this one. I do focus on the design and the presentation and that sort of thing but I really have very little to add other than as a consumer.
With one exception, it’s worth emphasizing that transparency and clarity is critical and that includes the use of graphics. We all know the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” and I do think that if you can find the right graphic presentation of a concept it can be very useful as a tool for communicating something to investors and to the public. I find that to be a useful element of thinking about design.
On the other hand, I’ve seen lots of instances where companies have lots of things all over the place and pictures and stuff and it’s hard to understand what’s the story, what’s the actual narrative here. I don’t like graphics for graphics sake so I do think there’s a balancing act for the use of graphics.
The organizing principle is totally around clarity and transparency and how can I use graphics to communicate my message effectively. That’s the starting point.
Make sure that you’re not losing something with the graphics. That’s why it’s so important to that partnership between designers and the actual drafters.
