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