Reading #8: Chapter 16

Chapter 16 deals entirely and unrepentantly with the concept of visual design, and the different approaches and methods that are available to the enterprising technical communicator whereby they might be successful. From the text "A fundamental goal for information design is to enable and enhance relationships among stakeholders for an artifact...The field of information design focuses on devising novel ways to enable relationships among people through the effective design of content." Appearance is front and center in this chapter, as we are informed multiple times of the manner in which human beings read things, from the first glance and impression to the way we process information in a chunked/non-chunked presentation. There are three main concepts proposed in the chapter:  1) rhetorical grouping of information; 2) contrasting ideas; 3) signaling structural relationships.  One of the phrases that was used in the chapter that I found most helpful in understanding, and that in fact made me think of visual organization in a different way was, "strategic content grouping - making implicit structures explicit." This makes total sense. At last! A clear, concise description of all the rigmarole involved. What we all should aspire to when we design visual documents is to make the implicit explicit. The chapter talks us through the use of seriff vs. sans seriff fonts, double signaling, and the way the human mind works with the x height of different fonts, which was honestly quite interesting to read about. The remainder of the chapter gives a heuristic for leaning how to work this into your own life. I had almost managed to wipe the dreaded heuristic from my memory, but here it has crept back into my life. I think that these are bloated, counter-intuitive and unnecessary. Something that I found frustrating was a passage that said "for examples of this, see X and Y, where they of course named two scholars. Why not put the information into the body of the text? They didn't even refer to what the referenced material really had to do with the broader discussion! They simply said, see this to understand this. I took a few things away from the chapter, but overall I think that visual design is quite straight forward and the book didn't really do anything to build anything more than a basic understanding.