What Is A Good Document Design?

According to Putnis & Peter (1996, p.254 ), a good document design should help readers read efficiently, emphasize the most important contents, encourage readers to feel good about a communication and also balance the negative (white) space with positive space (text, title, visuals). I will use my group presentation as an example to further explain on this.

Slide 4

Slide 13

Balanced Slide

Based on my slide 4 (top), it is clearly shown that it is a little too text heavy without images to attract the audience and my slide 13 (middle) consist only image without any text to support which could be imbalanced as there are negative (white) space around.

According to Walsh (2006, p.26), written text is no longer the dominant part and is just part of the message. Reep (2006, p.136) further supported by stating that readers tend to notice the features with most “weight” first. KVL (2006, p. 177) stated that an integration of text and image (multi-modal) will help the reader to understand better. Therefore, judging from my slide 4, the readers will notice the colorful bright words first and probably won’t read the text at all if the readers prefer image over text and could lead to unable to deliver the message across successfully.

As for slide 13, the reader will be confused if they didn’t listen attentively to the previous slides which cover the points concerning the image at slide 13. Therefore, a balanced document design is required to produce a good document design so that the readers will be attracted to read and also will not get confused. For example, look at the balanced slide above.

Group Presentation

Individual Presentation

Of course, good writing is essential in producing a good document. Rothman (2005) said that good writing skills are detailed, realistic and it relies on information directly without associative interpretations. This was clearly shown through our group presentation (above) as all our points are in bulleted forms and we use different typefaces/color to emphasize on the importance of the text. Therefore, for my individual presentation (below) , I will make use of the bullets in my slides to explain my points and also not use more than 2 main points per slides. I keep my points direct and briefs so that the readers will understand at a glance.

Reference:

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 2006. Reading images. Chapter 6: The meaning of composition.

Putnis, P, Petlin, R 1996, Professional Communication: principles and applications, Writing to communicate, Prentice hall, Sydney

Reep, Diana C. 2006, ‘Chp 6: Principles of Document Design,’ in Technical Writing, 6th ed., Pearson Edu, Inc., New York, p.133-170.

Rothman S (2005), “What makes good scientific technical writing?,” Associated Content, viewed 7^th April 2009, http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/9447/what_makes_good_scientific_and_technical.html

Walsh, M. 2006,” ‘Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,”