Good design for screen genre.

For our assignment, my group members presented on the topic Writing to Communicate. Although the presentation was very informative overall, it lacked strength in design and layout principles which could have engaged the audience eve more.

The first slide I will discuss is the following:

According to Bernahdt (1986)’s visual gestalt, there is good visual comparisons as well as continuation of text. But if we look at it from Reep (2006)’s perspective, there is little balance of the pictures present. The heading is clear as it allows the reader to focus on the top first to find the data and as we progress, see the top to find changes in topic. The spelling mistake of listerner makes the information look less credible and poorly collected to attract the reader.

This slide is a continuation of the previous slide hence there is no proper heading given to it. Reep (2006) mentions the importance of having lists and indentations in slides to make them more reader friendly. This is present in the slide which makes it a very attractive and easy to read pattern. The colour red on the word “example” places great emphasis that this segment is important and directs our attention towards it. It develops fluently as the climax is placed towards the centre of the page and the closure gives us a brief conclusion of the topic, hence this slide can be considered more appealing than the first.

This slide has a more balanced image and the visuals are balancing out each other due to their positioning. While one image is focused on writing and the other on hearing which commutates a speaker shows a summary of the topic being discussed. a The margins make the work look neat, the heading is clear and attracts attention.

Overall, I felt that the group presentation was verbally good, but slides were at times messy and poorly presented. The strength of this presentation was that it was very clear in conveying its message and the biggest drawback was that it lacked visuals to relate our theories to real-life perspectives which could have made the presentation more engaging.

References:

Bernhardt, S 1986, Seeing the Text, Composition and Communication, viewed April 12th 2010,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/357383

Reep, D 2006, Document Design, Technical Writing, 6th Edition, New York Ch. 6, pp. 133-172