Field notes · 19 January 2026
Council pages that survive black-and-white printing
Design choices that keep municipal program charts readable when members print packs overnight.
Many Bangkok council packs still travel as paper. Colour encodings that look clear on a projector can collapse into grey mush on a laser printer. We design municipal program pages assuming at least half the members will print.
Patterns, labels, and direct value callouts beat colour alone. A bar chart with the number beside each bar survives photocopying; a heat map of pale greens often does not. Line charts need distinct stroke styles when three programs share a page.
Margins matter. Committee folders clip the outer centimetre. We keep titles and axis labels inside a safe frame and leave room for handwritten notes — officers often annotate during the sitting.
Test one page on the office printer before the pack goes to the clerk. That single print often catches a legend that disappears or a footnote that wraps into the binding.