Today’s Plan:
- Review Flyer Redesigns
- Very Quick Exercise #1: Taking and Saving a Screenshot
- Very Quick Exercise #2: Cropping a Photograph
- Very Quick Exercise #3: Placing Text on an Image
- Document Design
Review Flyer Designs
Intersections Between Technical Communication and Document Design
As I mentioned last class, my degree is in Rhetoric and Composition. While “rhetoric” can have many different definitions, it generally concerns how humans can gain the attention of others in order to better communicate complicated ideas and solve collective problems (philosophy is an individual exercise, rhetoric a social one). Hence why so many graduate programs in Rhetoric and Composition offer specializations in visual rhetoric and design: the techniques we use to develop oral and print content are also relevant in visual fields. Tuesday, I talked mostly of graphic design principles–how we approach designing visuals that, while they might contain words, have rhetorical purposes that words alone probably cannot achieve. Today I want to talk about how some of those basic principles–Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity–operate in print documents, and how we can design print documents to maximize reader comprehension. This carries us into the realm of technical communication, which invests significant energy in studying how people actually read documents, and what we can do to help them read more/efficiently (see, for instance, website heat maps).
There’s two things I want to emphasize regarding document design today:
- Crafting Meaningful Headings
- Labeling Graphs and Figures
Let’s work in this sample document.
Homework
Read the Fadde and Sullivan essay (files section of Canvas). Answer one of the discussion questions on pages 145-146 (and let me know which one you are answering!)
