Document Design

What is a good document? To be really effective the writer should present part of his/her reasoning process and things that may have altered the result or results they interpreted (Rothman 2005). This clearly states that it is important for the author to produce a excellent piece of document.


After conducting a research on document designing, I have conclused that there are several factors for producing a good document with good design. Examples of some of the factors are clear and proper fonts, suitable and related images, sub-headings and a clear title.


Whenever a person reads a document, it is natural for the person to briefly analyze the document if it is worth reading. This statement is supported by Schriver (1997) which states that people decide if they want to read a certain document when they look at it. This statement is supported by Nielsen (1997) which states that people rarely read word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.


What is the first thing that comes into your mind when you look at this slide?

This slide above is a slide is taken from my group's presentation slides. In my opinion, this is a very good and clear slide. The size of the fonts on the slide were clear and easy to read. According to Putnis & Petelin (1996), factors such as type and size of font and the amount of white spaces in between them contributes to producing a good document. Besides that, the spacing between the words are equally spreaded out. This slide is not too wordy and it attracted the attention of the audience because of the colour and it is easy to read. The audience would also read everything on the slide because it is straight to the point.


According to Reep (2006), the audiences read both the written text on the page and "read" the visual presentation as well. If a slide is too wordy, it would be hard for the audience to focus because human attention span is approximately eight to ten seconds per slide.




This next slide above is also taken from my group's presentation slides. This slide uses both visual image and text to help the audience to understand. In my opinion, the text in this slide is insufficient because it does not explain the picture well. If a viewer would just read this slide above without having any explaination, the viewer might not really get the meaning of the text in the box. According to Schriver (1997), documents designs with texts and pictures help people to achieve their specific goals for different purposes.

Furthermore, this slide above can be improved by adding text into it to explain it. It is important to coherently and appropriately integrate words and graphics to create a clear and understandable information for the readers (Putnis & Petelin 1996). This shows that both text and image are important in a document as it catches the reader's attention and helps the reader to understand it. Both text and image carries the same level of importance and credibility (Schriver 1997).




References :

Neilsen, J 1997, How Users Read on the Web, viewed 6 September 2009, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html>.

Putnis, P & Petelin, R 1996, 'Writing to communicate', in Professional communcation: principles and applications, Prentice Hall, Sydney, pp. 223-263.

Reep, DC 2006, 'Document Design', in Technical Writing, 6th edn, Pearson/Longman, New York, pp.133-172.

Rothman, S 2005, What makes good scientific technical writing?, viewed 6 September 2009, <http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/9447/error>.

Schriver, K.A 1997, 'The interplay of words and pictures', Dynamics in document design : creating text for readers, p. 361-441, Wiley Computer Pub, New York.