In Susan H. Delagrange’s webtext about revision and design, I was especially intrigued.
While she was talking about her project, I made connections with the things she was talking about and my own projects and work.
Right now I am in JOUR 3510, which is the Editing and Design class for journalism majors. We are finally getting into one of the most exciting parts of the class (at least, in my opinion): design. We talk about how to design newspapers on actual paper and on websites. My New Media class and this Writing for the Web class both help me incorporate thinking about website design. Either way, there is a lot of though that goes into the design and presentation of something… things I never even thought about.
Did you realize the action of the page on a newspaper has to go with the direction of the action in the picture on the page? If there is a person in the picture who is pointing his arm in the air to the left, then the picture must go on the right side of the page, so the man will be pointing toward text, not off the page. There are little things, such as picture action, that we all take for granted about the design of newspapers. It’s made me look at everything- posters, book covers, magazines, cereal boxes- and wonder what other design factors do we take for granted?
Since we’ve been discussing website design in this class and New Media and newspaper design in Journalism, I’ve found myself intrigued by nearly everything I look at during my day. The ads on the bus mesmerize me…. is their design coherent to their message or intended reaction? Is it eye-catching? What could be done to improve it?
In high school, I designed the playbills for my high school drama department. I used Print Shop Deluxe and made the pages using the double-sided greeting card setting. It was a lot of work, not only to design it on the computer, but I had to plan where everything would fit, so all of my “greeting cards” would fit together in the correct order. It was totally worth it though to see the excited faces of my drama department when I showed up with the finished product.
Looking back though, with the knowledge I’ve picked up about design through my college classes, especially this semester, I probably could have made the playbills even more professional-looking….
But, design changes and evolves over time. As fancier software becomes available and society craves more “visual” content instead of “textual,” we have to adjust our design methods accordingly. As I’ve seen how fast this progression has been going, I’m curious as to what the future will bring. How will this craving for the visual be satisfied? How interactive can websites get? If newspapers survive, what will they look like twenty years from now? The AJC recently redesigned itself and now it looks like they modeled their actual paper version after the website layout…. is something like this in our future across all newspapers?
