Document Design

Here, I will be discussing on, what is a good document?

To start off, what is a document design? It is the field concerned with creating texts that integrate words and pictures in ways that help people to achieve their specific goals for using texts as stated by Shriver (1997). Hence, in simple terms, document design is the manipulation of words and images to entice and convey messages to an audience.

In a good document design, good manipulation of visual and text is very important. This is because audience are not homogenous, they have various cultures and backgrounds depending where they from and thus interpreting visual and text differently (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Another aspect to consider is the technical part of document design. A good document must have good and appropriate designs to go with it too. The five design laws referred by Bernhart (1986) is very functional, for instance the law of visual identity which is achieved through heading and identifying symbols, law of equilibrium, closure and others. Besides this, is the Reep's basic principles of design (1997) like symmetry, balance and so on. If one follows these laws and principles in doing a design, producing a good document design is a definite.

In reviewing my group presentation slides, the overall writing and layout is good. However, it lacks the good application of the proportion principle as identified by Reep (1997). From first glance, the title and the annotation look similar in size as shown below:

Before:

To improve, the title ‘The Textual Shift’ should have been made bigger than the annotation so that the heading gets immediate attention. Although the title is bolded and capitalized, a bigger size would increase the captivity to the title even more.

After:

Another setback is keywords are not highlighted. As mentioned by Nielsen (1997), in his article, 'How users read on the web", highlighted keywords is a form of scannable text, which functions the same for presentation slides. When audience view the slides, they are just scanning the text to see what the presenter is about to say because their main focus is on the presenter's elaborations. Hence, the highlighted keywords, help the audience to distiguished what is important to focus and remember. As shown in the diagram below, key terms are definitely distinguished but not highlighted through bolding:

Before:

After:

The bolding directs the eyes of the audience to the text and automatically they response by taking the bolded text as something important to deem and probably remember as well.

References:
1. Bernhardt, SA 1986, ‘Seeing the text’, College composition and communication, Vol. 37, No. 1, p.66-78.

2. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 2006. Reading images. Chapter 1: The semiotic landscape: language and visual communication.

3. Nielsen, J 1997, How users read on the web, viewed 11 September 2009, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html>

4. Reep, DC 2006, ‘Chp 4: Principles of Document Design’, in Technical Writing, 6th ed., Pearson Edu, Inc., New York, p.173-190.

5. Schriver, K.A. 1997, Chapter 6 in Dynamics in document design: creating text for readers, Wiley Computer Pub., New York

Purpose

In this blog, the discussion will be on issues relating to publication and design of documents. Here, I will be sharing ideas from professionals and my own opinions on the issues; issues like, key elements that constitute a good document design and many more subjects. Anybody of radical interest about these subjects is most welcome to view and learn.