Here is my essay so far. I have to finish tonight. Any comment would be apprecitated.
James Schutt
English 149
When children are young they love children's book. The large colorful pictures of animals and a short funny sentence in large font. As a person gets older, they out grown the huge colorful pictures in children's books, and replace them with the pictures, charts, and the smaller size fonts of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. People from the time they start looking at books, newspaper, or any other kind of document are drawn to text and images. Now we have the Internet which allows for the combination of not only text and still images, but moving images. The evolution of the relationship between text, images, and they layout of a document is a natural progression, not a radical change.
The choices of font and font size have always been very important to a quality document. Fonts that are hard to read can frustrate the reader causing them to because less interested and distracted for the document. As technology has developed the choice of fonts has grown dramatically. But even with all these choice in font, most people still fall back on just a few such as Arial and Times New Roman. The number of choice may have changed but the importance of a good choice in font is something that technology will never override.
Font size is just as important has which font is chosen. Very small fonts can fit lots of word on a page but are hard to read if the reader has poor eye sight. Small fonts also make the message stand out less causing the message of the text to be lost. Excessively large font size takes up large amount of the page and requires the reader to scan a larger portion of the page to read a single sentence. This is a lot of work for the eyes and will cause the reader to tire out quickly. One positive things excessively large fonts can do is convey extreme importance such has the headlines on a newspaper. A compromise is font size is as much important today as yesterday. Back when documents were hand printed using a printing press or using an early printer which where expensive, fitting has much readable information on a page as possible was important to save costs.
Modern media has offered us with an ever increasing range of options for the layout of the document. In a modern word processor it is easy to change the format of a page between different layouts. The purpose of a layout if to organize the ideas in the document so it can be read easily. Will all these new choices one would expect to see lots of new layouts being used. But this isn't the cases. For example in the Neuroscience document handed out in class, the main layout generally a two column design. Laying out a page will multiple column has been around for a very long time. The most common example is the newspaper. Web pages often have a similar layout. Many will have three columns, two smaller ones on each side and a main one in the middle.
People have always incorporated pictures into documents. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then adding one to a page cam dramatically increases the effectiveness of the document. Technology has allowed us to put fancier clip art and colored graphic in our document. But even before technology allowed us to do this easily people still realized the value of pictures. For example, shopping catalogs had pictures of their products to incise the reader. Web pages take the idea a step further with technologies like Flash which can have moving graphics. This is a step beyond what could previously be done, but isn't by any means a radical departure from traditional media.
Whether it is fancy Flash graphics on a modern web page, or a simple black and white chart in the business section of a newspaper from 100 year ago, they both server the same purpose, to enhance the document they are placed in. The choice and importance of a good document has always been key to an effective document. The evolution of technology only means this relationship between text, layout, and graphic is increasingly more apparent.
