Lesson for Week 4: Day 1
4:1Write summaries of Mellon's and McGloughlin's views from chapter 5 in Lambrecht and send them to me, to make a blog entry, and to read pages 11-86, 117-120, and 121-173 in Robin Williams The Non-Designer's Design Book and “Resumes” in HTW.
When people talk about document design, they refer to the way print and images are laid out on the page. This area of study is sometimes called information design, a more inclusive term that includes design of digital information in variety of forms. The basic assumption under girding this practice is that the way something appears on the page or screen either helps the reader gather the structure of information or inhibits the reader's ability to do so.
Historically, document design grew out of the discipline of publishing, which grew out of fascination with the powers that being able to being able to publish multiple copies with the press. Publishing by way of the printing press vastly accelerated the pace of publication and the availability of information. As an aside, it takes little reflection to realize that the introduction of digitial information has accelerated the process and availability of information even more radically than the press did before the digital age. Before the press, all texts were hand copied; they were "manuscripts." If you carry the history of texts back far enough, you discover that writing has complemented speaking throughout history (by definition it would have had to because history is defined as a "written" account). Nevertheless, it is useful to think of publishing as being parallel to the fifth canon of rhetoric, delivery.
Classical rhetorical theory (theory developed in ancient Greece and Rome) taught that there are five canons of rhetoric. Canons are not big guns; in fact, I'm not really sure what they are, but it is closer to the mark to think of them as books. What they are in practice is five subparts of the process involved in developing a piece of rhetoric, whether it is a speech or a text. The canons of rhetoric are the following:
One modern myth is that people working with texts have only recently begun to concern themselves with the way text appears on the page. It is true that the age of personal computers has made it possible for just about anyone to experiment with document design, a process that used to be much more complex, but as a quick survey of the attached historical documents (housed at Cornell University) shows, writers have focused attention on the "surface" features of text for a very long time.
Good document design emphasizes the structure of information, so the first thing one needs to do is to have a pretty good idea of the structure of information. If you are the writer, then you have to build an underlying structure. Information is clearly understood, by both the writer and the reader, if . . .
Of course the list above assumes an extended text like a memo or report, but the same general principle of "chunking information" applies even to smaller texts like business cards and fliers.
Once a text has coherence--that is, once it has a clear and rational structure of ideas--the document designer can begin to surface that structure so that the reader instantly sees the chunking and sequence of information. Good document design, however, not only emphasizes the structure of information; it also invites the reader into the text--it gives pleasure because of its aesthetic qualities.
In your reading for today, Robin Williams presented four principles of design with the unfortunate acronym CRAP. She, however, discusses them in reverse order. Although I don't intend to say much about these because Williams does a much better job than I can, I do want to comment briefly.
Williams also tells us a great deal about font and type in pages 121-173. I don't intend to comment on this material here, but you should have read it, and the material from those pages may appear on your tests. All I want to say about font and type is that your selection of font is a very subtle indicator of tone. Consider, for example, the obnoxious documents you either received or created when you first discovered the great varieties of font available in Word or some other word processing package. Experimenting with fonts is fine, but exuberance over possibilities often produces documents that look infantile to the practiced eye. Fonts can create several kinds of impression--professional, playful, aggressive, sophisticated--just as clothing can.
Read chapters 6&7 in Lambrecht. Finish your letter of application and resume. Try to apply the principles of good structure to the letter and good design to the resume. If you haven't read sections on the letter of application and resume in HTW be sure to do so before you complete these documents. Remember that there are some good examples at Monster.com. Notice the qualities of document design discussed in this lesson as they are applied in the letters and resumes.
Complete the job application packet and send it to me, consisting of the job advertisement, your informal investigative report, the letter of application, and the resume. If you are wondering what the informal report should look like, here is an example of one by Shantel Julius that works pretty well.
Here are some job packets to use as examples:
You should also check my grading criteria for the job packet. Send them to me as email attachments.
