Good Document Design

There are many criteria on how a document should be designed to interest readers.

A poor document design would discourage proper and full reading of any particular document, which is contradictive to most publication’s purpose.

There are many rules and guidelines on making an attractive document design, take for example Reep(2006) design principles which discusses about Balance, Proportion, Sequence, and Consistency.

There is also an article about Nielsen’s 2005 worst weblog designs , which you can find here.

To illustrate the principles I will put up a few of my slides and analyze on how it was, correctly/incorrectly applied:

For the sake of this application, I will discuss on the point of Consistency by Diana Reep's theory.

(also because it's probably the only one I applied correctly :D)

Reep (2006) says Consistency refers to presenting similar features in similar styles.

On all 3 slides I used the same colors, format and margins. What does this do? Well I imagine the audience would be distracted and find it much more unpleasant if there was one with a different formatting, even with the same content, right after the first slide, something like:

Not that it looks worse, but because audience would waste time and concentrate less on what I'm trying to present instead of listening.

Other views on document design, particularly Nielsen's would say I applied his third principle (Non-Descript Posting Titles) incorrectly before, I put "Hello :D!" as my blog title previously, after reading the article, I think that's probably true, people looking to learn about Publications and Design would not find it very relevant, thus miss the search.

Well, I think I kinda passed the word limit by abit already, so I'll save the rest of the principles for another time, so do come back!

Reference List:

Nielsen, J 1997, Writing for the Web, viewed on 17 April 2010, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html

Reep, DC 2006, 'Document Design', Technical Writing, ch. 6, 6th ed, pp. 133-172