Web Design vs Print Design - Part I

Print documents exist since the beginning of human civilization, however online media -- the internet came out as a new form of media just a few decades back. Discussing the effectiveness of these two types of medium, both serve the purpose of delivering messages to the readers. Especially now, the importance of multimodal document, the design of both text and images are equally important to deliver the correct message to the readers. According to Maureen Walsh (2006), multimodal texts are texts which incorparate a few elements such as text, visuals and sound.

Print Design

Lets us first discuss about printed documents. Printed documents, includes newspaper, magazines, novels, comics and etc, each has it's own unique method in delivering the messages in it effectively. How do we differentiate these few types of genre and categorizes them? We look at their most prominent differences, the design.

I'm taking a comic and a magazine design to make a comparison.

7 boxes Garfield comic

Source: http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Glade/8938/pizzacomic.gif

2 pages spread magazine about Ciara
Source: gossip2sweet.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/jet1.jpg

The design of a comic is obviously with more graphics and less wording. The framing of the comic is using symmetrical white space to separate each image and the colouration of the images combines all graphics in the comic to a complete document. The content of the document is mostly delivered by graphical narration, which means telling story with only images. However, filling in dialogs for the characters helps the readers to understand the meaning of the graphic more clearly.

As for the magazine, although images are used in the document, but they did not tell the content of the whole article. What makes sense in this article is the wording in it. Article is written in columns of four in two pages and the subject is always described in detail. This is because readers, when reading a magazine, their eyes will not always follow the text from the beginning of the left till the right end of the page, therefore the existence of columns are actually to help readers in reading more comfortably. Readers will first glance through the page and notice the most salience part in the article. That is why, normally the title of the article will be the biggest and eye-catchy among all the texts in the entire page, followed by the sub-heading. Readers will also look through the pictures and make sense with the headline to predict the content of the whole article. And then only they will read the content in it. Magazine articles can be written in more detail form because article such as feature witting requires the author to describe the whole agenda by words only. Therefore the author needs to make full use of the two pages to deliver as much messages in the content as possible to the readers.