Disi-rony

TANoNati's picture

When I began looking the Thompson Handbook after reading Instructor Blog #5: Design, I couldn't help but begin to analyze the text using some of the qualities of design mentioned in the blog.

Since we're talking about design, I find the Thompson Handbook to be very difficult to read. I admit that a big part of this is because I'm using the e-book version and my computer is a few years old. The Adobe Flash presentation is pretty sluggish on my computer. For me, a simple PDF would be way more functional. I feel like this is technological overkill. The pages aren't animated and they are basically just images, so what's wrong with a simple PDF-like format instead of Flash package that requires a few moments of loading for every page?

Still, my personal computer problems aside, I attempted to judge the text by the criteria discussed in the instructor blog and the textbook just doesn't make a strong case. First: the design should be invisible. I feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the book's presentation. It's quite distracting; the sidebars are jam-packed with information. Not only does that go against normal convention, leaving the reader to scratch his or her head, but there is also no immediately clear connection or flow between the sidebars and the large graphics and blocks of separate text toward the center.

The design stuck out to me immediately, and confused me about where I was supposed to start and continue reading, which brings me to the second point made in blog 5: Good design leads the eye. The book's design definitely doesn't do that. At least on my computer screen, I see four columns full of information and I don't see a clear structure. My eye is drawn to the large central graphics, and then from there I don't know how to process the written information along the sides. I feel like I'm forced to jump around, leaving me with a disjointed idea of what I'm reading.

I don't think I am practiced enough with white space to comment on that element. However, to be honest, between the weird structure and the sluggish flash performance, it's a major struggle for me to read and process the text.

On the other hand, I found the Instructor Blog and the articles it linked to be pretty useful. The idea that good design is invisible got me thinking about my proposal, where I talked about treating my Excel spreadsheet instructions as an element on the desktop. My idea was to design the manual in a way that the user will be able to view it with an open window in Excel without having to switch back and forth. Thinking about invisible design got me wondering about how I could accomplish this without giving explicit instructions to the user on set up the computer screen. This will be a challenge, but I think it will be more effective if the user can just open up the manual and go with it while using Excel.

I especially liked the discussion of white space in A List Apart. The illustration of the "exploded diagram" of a sandwich is a brilliant demonstration of the importance of while space. In engineering, we use exploded diagrams to show how parts of an assembly fit together. Without the space in between the parts, someone looking at the diagram might not be able to distinguish separate pieces, let alone see how they fit together. This is analogous to the point the article makes about white space. White space decongests blocks of writing and helps reveal a document's structure to a reader, which both increase a document's readability. I've been told my writing is pretty dense, so I took special note of The Economist's trick of adding white space to the typeface itself.

One last thing I wanted to mention is more of a question than a comment. The discussion of maximizing white space in a typeface made me think of serif and sans-serif fonts. In freshman comp, I learned that serif fonts like Times New Roman were easier for the eye to process and were meant for use in the body of the text. However, I don't see this being used very often, and it seems to go against the idea of typeface white space. Is the idea that footed fonts help the eye process true, and if so how would that tie in with our design discussion?

Typefaces

Kristin's picture

What you learned about serif fonts is in fact true (at least, that's what the science apparently says). A quick cognitive psychology explanation ... Reading is an automatic process – meaning you don't actually sound out a word every time you read it; eventually you see the words and you just know what they are and what they mean. Once reading is automatic, we do so very quickly and we don't even actually process the individual letters in a word, we see the word as a whole, or rather, we see one item instead of a combination of several. This is where footed fonts come in. The curls on the font make the letters more cohesive as a whole, and thus, help us to process the word more quickly. This is a quick, quick version of what I've learned on the subject, and hey, take it with a grain of salt, because there's all sorts of web pages that we read all the time with huge bodies of sans-serif font!

For a fun example, though, of how we process the whole word and not just the letters, look at the text on this page:
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/

You can read it without trouble even though the letters are mixed up!

Kristin

TH Analysis

jrdavies's picture

I always dread reading chapters out of the Thompson Handbook too, and I even have the hard copy. As you said, it's jam-packed with information. I think they're going a little overkill on the 'proximity' rule. Most of the content on each page is generally related, but everything is so close together that it's hard to determine which images relate to a certain blocks of text. I think they also over-do the alignment, or at least it isn't organized in an efficient way. Again, your response identifies the four columns used on every page. The columns, however, are not arranged so that they are intuitive to the reader. The far left corresponds to the far right, and everything in the middle is dedicated to examples. While writing our instructions for this project, I think we should pay attention to proximity, but also white space, because too much of either will deter the audience from reading the text.

Overkill R8

secolema's picture

I like what you said about “technology overkill.” It got me thinking about bad PowerPoint’s that I’ve seen in the past. When you put too much effort into cramming in animation, designs, and pretty things that really don’t translate information then you run a serious risk of losing your audience. It is yet another one of those fine lines that we must walk, much like the line between being boastful and qualified on a resume, and the line between the novice approach and the idiot approach. It seems to me that writing always will have some issue that you will need to find a happy medium to properly speak to your audience.

Shane

White Space

Isaac's picture

I am glad to see I am not the only one confused by the Thompson Handbook. It really takes a huge amount of concentration and attention to follow it. This obviously reflects the design as many people have stated.

I too have struggled with the idea of white space. I certainly see the importance in specific examples but have been having difficulty thinking of solid ways to implement it. Like you said you don’t want to have your document too dense because it’s hard to read and you also don’t want too much white space because then your eyes will be running all over the page. I think this section is a good one to go back and re-read again to get a solid grasp.

overload!

After reading your response on Chapter 24/25, I couldn’t agree with you more. The Thomas Handbook is really kinda contradicting itself. The book is trying to explain proper methods to use design elements into documents. However, as I’m reading everyone reading response, there’s seems to be a growing number of fellow students who are sharing their disinterest in the Thompson Handbook. What is this saying? Matter of opinion? The fact is maybe they should have taken their own advice on design elements. The book is overload with information with bright colors to the point of making it difficult to focus.

handbook

I agree with most of the other students and think the Thompson Handbook is also very hard to follow. I usually wait until the last minute to do my reading responses when I have to read out of the Thompson Handbook because of the amount of effort it takes to read the handbook and process all the information it gives you at once. I also am confused why they put so much information in the side bars while it seems most other books only put little side-notes or non-essential information in the side bars.

Also I have read that link Kristin put in the first comment, and the first time I read it, I was surprised how easy it is to read words even with all the letters mixed up. But it seems to prove her point that people look at the word as a whole, not as individual letters.

Patrick Griffin
pgriffin@purdue.edu

Thompson

I also wait till the last minute to try and do most of my work. After doing this weeks readings I also realized how difficult it was to try and understand everything that is going on. They have a lot of information spread out through the pages. I also find it difficult to follow the information that the writer has written in the sides. I believe that there is a much better way the writer could present that information to make it less confusing.