Worlds apart

When it comes to print and web designing, document designers will find it hard to agree that one specific system may be effective for both mediums. If these issues were disregarded, the elements in the design for the documents might appear to be contradictory to one another. For example, one of the elements of print design is salience which is a specific layout to attract the reader’s attention to different degrees, and through a wide variety of means (Kress & Leeuwen 1998).

The act of reading and understanding print design is not static. This is because it involves different levels of decoding, responding and comprehending at affective and cognitive levels (Walsh 2006). The process of reading print design is dynamic and interactive. During the process of print document designing, these elements have to be taken into account in order to create coherent meaning.

On the other hand, web designing requires a very different mindset and thinking altogether. This is because people rarely read Web pages word by word, instead they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences (Nielsen 1997). In addition, people generally web pages in an F-shaped pattern across the page (Nielsen 2006). These elements are unique as they apply exclusively to web designing only.

As such, the document designers may use these theories in order to have a deeper understanding of how people read and interpret texts whether it is print or web. With this understanding, a document with elements that compliment each other can be created and gain positive feedback from the readers.

References

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 1998, Approaches to media discourse, Blackwell, Oxford.

Walsh, M 2006, The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.

Nielsen, J 1997, How Users Read on the Web, Useit.com, viewed 29 April 2008, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html

Nielsen, J 2006, F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content, Useit.com, viewed 29 April 2008, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html