Good Design – Is there a Rule of Thumb that has to be followed?

According to Reep (2006), document principles are categorised into four parts; balance, proportion, sequence and consistency. On the other hand, Bernhardt (1986) argued that there are a handful of laws that needs to be followed; law of pragnanz (equilibrium), law of gestalt (good continuation) and the law of similarity. Who is right about a good document design? Authors have continued to wrestle on this topic but then again, they tend to come back to the basics where both these authors have portrayed in their articles.

Based on our group presentation 1, each student taking this course, Issues in Publication and Design were required to present of the shift of texts, multimodality, semiotic landscape and a few others. We were also required to prepare powerpoint slides to aid our presentation. As they were wrestling on their point of view versus the conventional approaches that were found from articles given to us, most of them have used visual aids (i.e pictures). As some were very interesting and helpful, some were not at all relevant. For example, if Student A’s topic was on multimodality where his view was print text should not be alone but should be presented with a visual aid as an enhancement but he uses a picture WITHOUT words and in black and white colour to explain his view, he is already contradicting his statement. Am I right to say this? Besides, this is an example of poor document design as no consistency.

On the other hand, if Student B, arguing on the same topic shows his image with a contrast of colour, as Reep (2006) states, ‘color weighs more than black and white’, with appropriate headlines and short sentence to elaborate the picture, he would have had consistency, balance and proportion.

Below are some examples of powerpoint slides from group presentation 1:

Example of slides that shows pictures but no words to explain what the image is all about.

An example where there are texts to accompany the image, given more consistency, less contradiction, more balance and proportion to one's presentation.

References:

Bernhardt, S, A, 1986, 'Seeing the text', College Composition and Communication, Vol. 37, No.1, pp.66-78

Reep, D, C, 2006, 'Chapter6: Document Design', Technical Writing, Pearson/Longman, 6th edn, pp. 133-172

Media Publishing in the World of Today

How would you choose to keep in touch with the world’s happenings today? Do you read newspapers? Watch live news on television? Or simply turn on your computer and click on any online news provider and read? It seems that the media today has evolved so much, so many varieties for us to choose from. Well, to be honest, given a choice on which to choose, I myself cannot confirm which media I will choose. I guess it all depends on our convenience, what do you say?

According to Naughton (2006), he stated that the existence of television was ought to ‘wipe out’ the existing media such as radio, movies and newspaper. Also, when blogs started, journalism never did perish did it? Instead, the evolvement of technology has provided us with more options. Naughton (2006) agreed to this as he stated in a scientific term that a new organism has arrived in the media ecosystem where the existing organisms will have to accommodate to the newcomer.

An example of newcomers in our media ecosystem would be social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and video streaming sites such as Youtube. These websites have in time, gain high popularity. Pardon me but hey, how many of you don’t log in at least ONCE a day to your facebook? Youtube on the other hand is arguably the fastest site in which we can view a breaking news, rather than waiting for News on TV2 at 8pm tomorrow. The best part of these sites is they actually link to each other. For example, if you’re not a Youtube user, but you have a friend in United States who has posted a video of earthquake in Haiti on Youtube and shared it in Facebook and tagged you in it, automatically you would be updated and start spreading the news, wouldn’t you?

Here’s an example of different media publishing on an ordinary football game:

Print-text (eg: newspaper article):

In yesterday’s crucial Champions League match, Manchester United managed to beat AC Milan flat. Although Milan scored first, a great fighting spirit was shown where Paul Scholes equalised. Upon Scholes’ goal, we saw the whole game lifted up a notch where United took the game to themselves, playing in an extraordinary tempo and in the end holding on to the lead they established.

Image based:

Video based:

In short, these varieties of media publishing have allowed more essence to be added to reports or reviews of a football match. This also means that these are all added values and not ‘wipe out’ against each media.

References:

Naughton, J 2006, ‘Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem’.

Nonownonos 2010, Manchester United vs AC Milan 3-2 Goals and Highlights, Youtube.com, viewed 13 April 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQLT2bSH3EM

Blogging Community – What is it? And how do we create it?

According to Chin and Chignell (2006), a blog is normally written by a single author and functions as mixture of document and links hypertext networks with social networks, creating a community where people discusses within the ‘blog’. Question is how is it that bloggers create a community to their writing? It is quite simply actually. A blogging community is created not to advertise and it does not need to be a famous public blog network but merely a society of bloggers that comes online together to help each other (Yoskovitz 2007). According to Yoskovitz (2007), these are the steps to creating a blogging community:

1. Get a Few Initial Members Involved.

2. Setup Forums.

3. Setup an Email Distribution List or Yahoo Group

4. Create a Website/Blog.

5. Focus on Group Blog Promotion.

6. Actively Recruit New Members.

This is an example of how blogging community can be created, not the only way. For deeper elaboration of each step, do view Yoskovitz’s explanation. Also, blogging community can be created via links and comments. Bauer (2006) stated that she links her blog to others as it is an essence of the spirit of generosity which is required to have a lively blogging community. Also, she added that by commenting, this allows people to share their piece of mind where you will know that readers are not only concerned with your discussion but also respond.

According to White (2006), there are 3 types of blogging community; one blog centric community, topic centric community and boundaried community (explanation for each type of community can be found here. An example of a one blog centric community would be kennysia.com where the author himself has the right and authority to allow or take off any comments by the community. From this blog, Kenny’s fans read his post and starts commenting on what he has started to discusse in the first place. However, as stated by Koterwas (2007), should the blogger close down this blog, the community would most probably perish.

References:

Bauer, E 2006, How to Build Blog Traffic – Community, Blogher, viewed 12 April 2010, http://www.blogher.com/node/8128

Chin, A, Chignell, M 2006, A Social Hypertext Model for Finding Community in Blogs, HT’06, ACM, Odense, Denmark.

Koterwas, T 2007, Blogs and Community – Parts 1 -5, wdil.org, viewed 12 April 2010, http://www.wdil.org/resources/blogs-and-community-parts-1-5

Yoskovitz, B 2007, Create Your Own Blog Network, Instigator Blog, viewed 12 April 2010, http://www.instigatorblog.com/create-your-own-blog-network/2007/01/17/