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Comment by Splines | Hacker News Reader

Just because you're in the finance division of a bicycle company doesn't mean you can't drive a car to work.

I meant that you’d think everything that comes out of Apple—including their finance division—would go through a central design and branding department, which would apply one central toolset to all inputs, regardless of what tools the originating division used.

This is certainly true in other companies that try their utmost to achieve a certain aesthetic at all times, e.g. Disney, IKEA, etc. The same companies that put their invoices, their products’ warranty cards, and probably the UX of their ERP system through their design process.

I’m not really sure what you think would look different about it if they used pages.

It wouldn't let people know it was prepared by Microsoft Word in the PDF info.

This is not an invoice, it's a financial document. Investors who read these are not impressed by fancy fonts or flowery graphics, the numbers on the sheet are the most important thing.

I’m not talking about fancy fonts or flowery graphics. More like having an eye for readability by correctly aligning the text in each column to allow scanning, having correct inter-rowset vs. intra-rowset spacing, and, even more important, working with the originating writers (in this case accountants) to ensure that textual columns are rephrased (but not in a way that changes their meaning!) if they take up so much space that they’re wrapping—and, in fact, reducing their size enough to ensure that a numeric or currency cell never wraps, which would perhaps even confuse an analyst into misreporting figures.

If you’ve ever seen the tables in a Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook, they’ve been put through this layout process. It’s nothing fancy—it’s just making sure that people can scan the bloody thing, and put their eye on the right numbers even with just a quick glance. It’s an attempt to reduce reading-comprehension errors, basically.

If you’d do it for a game with nothing on the line, why not do it for a company with perceived (and therefore real) equity value on the line?

These are some very closely held numbers, they're not going to send them to marketing to make pretty before they are released.

You know that even breaking news stories at a newspaper go through the layout department, right?

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