Seasons greetings- or how to offend people before the year's even begun

In case you hadn't noticed, it's nearly Christmas. I say you might not have noticed because in London, by this stage of December, most people are living on a diet of champagne and Berocca, with lunch sliding via a few office mince pies into a dinner where everyone seems to be wearing the same semi-ironic Santa hat procured from some dodgy stall on Oxford Street. But this being Paris, a few tasteful lights have gone up near the local mairie, your office colleagues will be grumbling that they have to use up some of their obscenely large holiday allowance to go shopping for presents, and otherwise it's business as usual.

That is, apart from the cartes de voeux. In a country that tends to do things the right way round when it comes to religion (no RE lessons at school: lots of public holidays for religious festivals) the end of year cards are something of an institution.

And so, a large pile arrived on my desk last week. Corporately tasteful, carefully avoiding any potentially offensive allusion to religion, they sat there accusingly while I tried to work out who should benefit from my seasonal wishes.

What I hadn't banked on was the steady trickle of colleagues asking me what they should write in their cards. It began last Wednesday. "I want to say, 'Que cette nouvelle année vous apporte la réussite dans tout ce que vous entreprenez, que le bonheur soit au rendez-vous dans vos cœurs et dans ceux de vos proches.' How do you say this in English?"

You don't. You really don't. If you were to write to a business contact that you hoped they succeeded in everything they undertook, and that happiness would reign in their hearts and those of their loved ones, they would probably never work with you again on the grounds you had clearly gone bonkers. 

Day two wasn't much better. "Que cette année soit pour vous source de réussites et de joies" is marginally less verbose, but wishing that next year will be a source of success and many joys seems to imply your contact may be expecting twins.

When I explain this, people are puzzled and disappointed.
-"But what should I say instead?
-Merry Christmas.
-Can it not be a little longer and nicer?
-How about, 'Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year'?"

They don't believe me. I may even lose my crown as oracle-of-all-things-English. And I haven't even written my own cards yet. Maybe I'll wish my English contacts a 2013 that rhymes with prosperity, health and joy and my French contacts seasons greetings. Then I won't have to send any next year.

Is a picture really worth a thousand words?

I’m about to say something that threatens my employability, or at least the figure in front of the zeros on my payslip each month. Design is more important than words. You can write the sharpest prose imaginable: if it’s badly presented, it will look sloppy and unprofessional.

Of course the reverse is also true: stylish design spattered with verbose nonsense smacks of all fur coat and no knickers. But it at least has the advantage that it looks ok from a distance.

I got to thinking about this because a designer friend of mine pointed out that while she likes what I write, she finds the black background makes it difficult to read the words. In a blog about communicating clearly, I’ve committed the cardinal sin of letting the design get in the way of the message.

I have a feeble excuse for this: it’s because I couldn’t think of a suitable picture to put at the top. The problem is that pictures come with immediate associations. A word’s meaning can be fluid, capricious, bent to the context it’s used in, in combination with other words. A picture leaps out of the screen and claims the meaning for itself. For this blog (broadly Anglo-French, focusing on language, corporate communication and translation) a picture of lots of flags might do the trick – except that flags make you think of politics. A picture of London? Finance. Paris? One of those blogs about Anglo-Saxons discovering smelly cheese and sexy people. Tower of Babylon? Too academic, un-corporate.

Bad design is worse than no design at all. It can cheapen, distort or constrict in a way that the odd badly-chosen adjective cannot. It plays the lead role in forming the reader’s first impression (and given that in the age of social media most people have the attention span of a gnat, this may well turn out to be the only impression they form.) And yes, I know there’s no such thing as “no design” – the minute you choose Helvetica over Arial or white background over black, you become a designer – but let’s say the potential for gaffes is lower than if you start sticking your holiday snaps at the top of the page.

Of course design is about more than pictures – the very best design is so much an extension of the structure and essence of the message that the user barely notices it. But I’m definitely not there yet. So if you think of a decent picture and a nice background colour I can use, please let me know.