Dear Gunnar,
Firstly, I would like to clarify that I wouldn’t have mentioned the book’s
design if the author hadn’t made the argument that the book was especially
well-designed. I'm also guilty of having designed poor things before.
I read the book 8 years ago at the wonderful TU Delft library so
unfortunately I don’t have a copy with me. I will have to resort to memory
and paraphrase.
The book has several layout problems. The illustrations, graphs, maps, and
other types of diagrams appear to be randomly assembled, that is, each has
its own generic style that results in a visual mess (and visual messes
distract from the content of a book). Instead of facilitating reading,
these assorted diagrams and illustrations convey information clumsily, they
tax the reader’s attention and cognitive ability to concentrate. With so
many different types of diagrams, the book's design would have benefited
from creating visual coherence between.
There are many other aspects of the book that are generically poorly
designed; but I won’t delve into them because the author made a special
point about the side-notes, and that’s what stood out and it's the reason
why I still remember it so many years ago.
According to Ware, his book is especially well designed because instead of
footnotes indexed with a number, he designed tiny symbols (in superscript)
that refer to a side-note. Therefore, the author argues, reading is faster
because the proximity of the tiny symbols makes it easier for the eye to
detect where the corresponding side-note is. Finally, according to Ware,
symbols are also better than a sequence of numbers for a reason I do not
recall at the moment.
Well, instead of facilitating reading, Ware’s design sprinkled what was
already a messy page (for the reason’s I pointed above) with further visual
confusion. Furthermore, Ware confuses visual perception with reading a
text. There is more to reading a text than perceiving graphic marks on a
paper. I would also add that the logic behind Ware’s argument disregards
the fact that each format has its own conventions.
For instance, when I see a poster I identify it as a poster because it
answers a series of expectations I have of what a poster is supposed to be.
If I rip a page from a book and hang it on a wall no one will interpret it
as a poster. A book page follows many conventions that make it easy and
quick for an observer to interpret that it is a book page. Same goes for a
poster, for film credits, for a business card and so on.
Practitioners that have mastered their art can - of course - subvert these
rules to good effect.
I'm sorry I couldn't precisely quote the author, but I hope I was able to
convey the gist of it.
'best,
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|