The importance of a design is absolutely crucial, as the Instructor Blog #5 stated, “Design is much more crucial than many people realize. It is not merely something that dresses up information; design is how users interact with data.” As a Computer Graphic Technology major,
I have used almost all these strategies that are provided in the Thomas Handbook. I think the book did a great job in emphasizing the importance of graphic elements in a design.
Chapter 24 went into great detail about how your visual content designs elements will convey a relationship between the images and surrounding text. The eye will naturally follow with the design in relationship to the contour. This is a very powerful tool to use in order to focus the audience attention on a certain area of the product. Having the able to control the flow of the audience eyes can be implied in a persuasive tactic.
I see persuasive posters all the time on the city bus. One in particular that always catches my attention was created to persuasive people to donate blood. The designer implied tactical strategies in this endeavor to help covey the message. The poster used a specific color that reflects the message (red), used affected white/negative space to focus the eye on the message with words, “Donate Blood” in the shape of blood drop. Even though it’s a rather simple design, the way it was layout and presented make it affected.
Chapter 25 dealt with basic fundamentals of color, display, organization, displaying documents, and typography. Typography is an interesting area in my opinion. The power of fonts! Who would have thought using sans serif fonts instead of a serif font could change the whole complexity of a document. In addition to the basic fundamentals, the alignment of shapes with the repetition can create a meaning pattern in helping to covey a message
Less summary, more application
I like your example of the Red Cross ad (I'm guessing that's what it is), but keep in mind that we want to turn our discussion to our current coursework. How might we utilize the techniques you see in this ad or in typography to produce our instruction sets? You're providing good summary, but it will be more productive for you and the class if you move from that summary to how our readings help us complete our project goals.
Switching Fonts
I was also surprised by the difference a simple change in font can make. Changing fonts was mentioned briefly in the textbook when we were reading about resumes, but I didn't really understand what it was trying to say. To be completely honest I did not know the difference between serif and sans-serif fonts, because all of the writing that I have done at Purdue has been in Times New Roman. I tried to incorporate the two types into my resume and failed miserably. I think this chapter did a much better job of explaining the difference between the two types and when to use each. I definitely plan on incorporating this into my instructions, using one type for the titles of the steps and the other for the main wording in each step. This should create contrast and lead my readers through the instructions.
Importance
I mentioned this in general in a previous thread, but I'll elaborate here: the issue of importance. As you have mentioned there are various aspects of a document, in particular the graphics, that offer different levels of importance in terms of how the document is taken by the reader(s). The overarching theme of this course is audience analysis, and the fact that those posters caught your attention means something in the regard. You, as an individual, have placed importance on contrasting or specific colors in graphics to produce certain effects-this is not by coincidence!. For instructions we have to identify where the importance is, as with everything, and it will probably be something like readability and effortless acquisition of pertinent information.