Document Design: Salience

Lets start with the simple definition of document design, According to Bastoky, on its quotes from Shriver's book Dynamics in Document Design, document design is a field that contains integration between images and words that help the audiences to use it principles correctly. each and every document designer will try top create nor designing their document in such manner so that it will attract readers attention. However, Theory is not the same as practices; even though it would seem easy to design a document, many matters and things have to be taken as consideration to produce an interesting and appropriate document that will attract readers. Putting plenty of pictures and minimize the amount of words for example; by doing this it will prevent the unnecessary distraction from the readers; as quoted from Nielsen (1997) who states that people usually will only scan a page of text without read the entire sentence inside. Another factors that needs to taken as a consideration would be the background colors and the font; as a contrast background color and font color will help the reader to read the content thoroughly and a clear-cut heading will help the reader to distinguish which topic are they in. According to Krees and van Leeuwen (1998), the readers can 'weight' their assesment in a variety of elements of the layout, such as foreground or background, relative size, contrasts in tonal value or color, differences in sharpness.

Example for document design

Few examples on my slides:

(Slide 1)

(Slide 2)

(Slide 3)

As you can see I applied the principles of Nielsen of "Credibility is an Important Issue".

I believe I put all the proper references (through oxford referencing) and provided link for the picture on the third slide.

On the application of Salience take for example the third slide,

I purposely took the picture on the centre of the slide, contrasted, and enlarged, proportionately to highlight that part of the slight. So that it becomes the centre of the idea for my audience as I presentate.

Reference List

Bastoky n.d., Fundamentals of Document Design, Online, viewed 17 April 2010, http://www.bastoky.com/DocDesignDef.htm

Kress, G & Leeuwen, T 2009, Reading Images, 2nd edn, Roudledge, New York.

Nielsen, J 1997, How Users Read on the Web, Online, viewed 17 April 2010, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 1998. “Front pages: The critical analysis of newspaper layout”, in COMM 1033. (UNISA electronic library)

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