Screen vs Print Document Design

Source: Muslima.com

Seeing is believing and therefore the presentation of a document is very important and it reflect on the issues of the design concept and the publishing. A good design is very subjective because each of the design is presented in a different way based on designer’s concept and creativity.

Reep (2006) defined, design features build up reader’s interest by keeping them focused on the information required. Due to that, majority of the readers prefer to read a document on a digital version compared to printed document.

Source: Smashing Magazine.com

Referring to Walsh (2006), words that were form into sentences is a print construct text. Whatever images and text that appear on any devices are multimodal text. As the world moving forward, it has changed the way of the document been viewed. With the print document, readers are required to flip or turn the page whereby the online document let the readers or the viewers to leave their comment or feedback. 

Besides that, the layout plays an important role on any print document design as mention by Hilligoss (2002). She mention that any layout design should  comes in three different alignment where the left side of the document represent the objective and the right side are mainly for some of info revealing  for the documents. Meanwhile the center part is normally for invitations purposes.

Source: Create Blog.com

Both online and print document design contains information but online version contains a greater visual interaction than printed one. A weblog consists of images that moving around and there are also interactive buttons for user to choose what they want to view. Reading is a complex activity that builds by layers of information (Hilligoss, 2002). There is a new way of sharing for online documents called ‘hypertext’ as mention by Benetos K. (2005). Hypertext are better presented by few types of written text like the yellow pages or white pages which contains all the telephone numbers and addresses. 

Source: ProBlogger

However, many have suggested the used of online media compared to print document because they believe that the online media will wipe out the newspaper business. Due to that, I do not believe that the printed document will be obsolete and I never support. As Nielsen (1999) said, print document design is based on allowing the eyes through the document while the web functions by letting hands move the information.

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REFERENCES

• Benetos K 2005, ‘Design Consideration When Writing : Print Vs Screen’, TECFA, viewed 11th April 2012, < http://tecfa.unige.ch/staf/staf-k/benetos/staf13/per5/lire.html >
• Hilligoss, Susan & Howard, Tharon 2002, 'Visual Communication - A Writer's Guide' Second Edition,[ONLINE] viewed 11th April 2012, http://www.ablongman.com/mycomplab_content/pdf/long_hilligoss.pdf
  
• Nielsen, J., 1999, Differences between print design and web design, viewed 11 April 2012, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990124.html>
•  Reep, Diana C 2006, Technical Writing, Longman, New York
• Walsh, M 2006, 'The ‘textual shift: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,' Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.