Understanding How to Design
Designing for print and web is totally different and both are influenced by the audience, purpose and context. Just like Bear (2008) said that 'form has function', people will expect different thing in print and web.
The style of presenting information in web is different compared to the print. Nielsen (2000) said that ‘users visit… website for its content. Everything else is just the backdrop. The design is there to allow people to access the content.’
In print, people read text linearly (Walsh 2006). While in web design, it allows more flexibility and interactivity for the readers and readers read using the
F-shaped pattern (Nielsen 2006). For example, a big contrast can be seen between a book and web whereby readers need to read the book page by page while in web, readers can link and navigate to where ever they want. For example, reading a manga:
(1)
(2)
(1) is the printed version of a Japanese manga called Naruto. Readers need to read it linearly according to its culture from right to left. While in (2), people can choose to read which ever manga they want to read online.
‘People rarely read web pages word by word; they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences’ (Nielsen 2006). So, information provided in the webpage should be short and simple as 'people read 25% slower online' (Nielsen 2006). Just like Nielsen (2000) said ‘keep your text short’. The guidelines by Nielsen (2000) are: ‘… no more than 50 percent of the text you would have used to cover the same material in a print publication, write for scannability [which] do not require users to read long continuous blocks of text; instead, …short paragraphs, subheadings, and bulleted list [and] hypertext [are used] to split up long information into multiple pages.’
Blogs are created this way. The flexibility and interactivity provided to bloggers, enabled them to link to each other to form communities unlike the print. For example,
The Star Blog provides Malaysian with this function while the printed version of The Star newspaper cannot.
There is one key thing to both web and print design whereby
elements and principles of design are essential to in both in order to create the mood to communicate effectively.
According to Evans and Thomas (2004, p. 4) design helps to create effective communication. Thus, it is important for all designers to realize how to make a good design and not to make mistakes so that the message can be communicate effectively.
The New Trend and IssuesThe continuous advancement of the Internet has formed a new form of media. Thus, created the emergence of new trends such as moblog, vlog, splog, and photoblog.
Blog had become a new form of online media. In 1995, when Malaysia embarked in the Multimedia Super-Corridor Project, Malaysia promised that there will be no censorship on the Internet (Ida Madieha Azmi 2003). This was taken advantage by people that caused many issues to arise.
Vlog enables bloggers to upload videos to express themselves while photoblogs allows users to upload photos. Some of this has caused the problem of infringement of copyright as people can post on clips of movies, songs and photos that belong to others.
An example of Vlog
An example of PhotoblogSplog or spam blog is ‘a fake blog created solely to promote affiliated Web sites, with the intent of skewing search results and artificially boosting traffic.’ (TechTarget 2006). This new form had created problems as the intention to spam others is not correct. It is ethically wrong to spam on others.
Through political blogs, issues of freedom of speech are arisen as many had used these blogs to create propaganda. Some had used blogs that defame others and also to touch on sensitive issues such as
Raja Petra case. Besides that,
Malaysia Today, a newsblog was once banned by the government.
Not only blogs have become new form, there are also other new forms of media. Print media had slowly made themselves available online such as newspaper online and magazine online. This new form of media had also caused issues to arise. Malaysiakini, a news website had also caused many controversies such as the one in 2003 for ‘publication of a letter in the site's public forum that questioned special rights accorded to ethnic Malays’ (Brewer 2001).
ReferencesBear, HJ 2008, Forms and Function in Design and Publishing, About.com, viewed 6 November 2008, <http://desktoppub.about.com/od/graphicdesign/a/formfunction.htm>.
Brewer, D 2003, Malaysia’s ‘independent voice’ back online, media release 21 January 2003, CNN.com, viewed 6 November 2008 <http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/southeast/01/21/malaysia.raid/index.html>.
Evans, P & Thomas, M 2004, Exploring the Elements of Design, Delmar Learning, New York
Ida Madieha Azmi 2003, Content Regulation in Malaysia Unleashing Missiles on Dangerous Web Sites, Bileta, viewed 6 November 2008, <http://www.bileta.ac.uk/Document%20Library/1/Content%20Regulation%20in%20Malaysia%20-%20Unleashing%20Missiles%20on%20Dangerous%20Websites.pdf>.
Nielsen, J 2000, Designing Web Usability, New Riders, Indianapolis
Nielsen, J 2006, F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content, viewed 6 November 2008 <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html>.
Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘Textual Shift’: Examining the Reading Process with Print, Visual and Multimodal Texts’, Australian Journal of Language Literacy, vol. 29, no.1, pp. 24-37.
TechTarget 2006, Splog, viewed 6 November 2008 <http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci1137059,00.html>.
F-shaped pattern
Facebook new layout
