TCBoK Report: Information Design Team Members Jordan Blackbird Phone: 717-824-2167 Email: [email protected] Tess Fox Phone: 856-237-9884 Email: [email protected] Sarah Tornetta Phone: 610-304-3605 Email: [email protected] 27 November 2012 TCBoK Report: Information Design Defining information design The title “Information Designer” encompasses a wide variety of fields within technical writing. Although it began as a subset of graphic design, information design emphasizes clarity, structure, and organization over artistic abilities. The goal is to make written information easier for readers to navigate and comprehend, and the structural arrangement of information is selected based on these needs. A prominent factor of information design is attention to detail. Specifically, this means attention to visual details on a page such as paragraph breaks, line indents, font sizes, column widths, and typefaces. Appropriate use of these elements improves message clarity, enhances readability, and makes a message more visually appealing. Information design is all around us. It exists in airport signage, package inserts, textbooks, and instruction manuals. No or poor information design results in confusion and frustration for readers; they waste time and energy searching for important details hidden amidst a jumbled mess. Therefore, information design is a necessary tool for facilitating understanding in various forms of written communication. Roles and responsibilities Audience Analysis An information designer has a wide range of responsibilities that vary depending on the firm or clientele one is working for. However, many tasks an information designer performs on a daily basis are similar regardless of one’s career. All information designers must conduct background research to ensure that they are proficient in their assigned topic, and audience analysis is an essential part of this. The reader dictates not just the material that is presented but the way in which it is presented. People who are color blind or visually impaired, for example, have difficulty reading certain colored fonts. Kitchel (1999) lists six specific font shades that have been shown to be readable by 99.9% of students with color blindness. An information designer must incorporate this and other visual elements into a document’s design in order to meet these needs. Translation Translation in information design involves the simplification of jargon and complex terms in order to make them appropriate for the intended audience. To accomplish this, an information designer must communicate with various professionals in their assigned topic to maintain accuracy during the simplification process. Effective translation of text requires knowledge of the specific writing requirements and formatting standards of a given organization. Information designers must collaborate with experts to design the layout, select diagrams or photographs that effectively illustrate the material, choose what font styles and headings to use, and determine how much text to put on each page. Before publication, they confer with experts to ensure that the content is accurate. Finally, information designers edit the material that they designed, review colleagues’ written works, and prepare the documents for publication. Navigation An information designer also guides readers through the content of a message. According to Pickett et al. (2001), “navigation means finding a sure, quick path to an information destination. Information design can make it easy for readers to move through text to the information they select” (p. 60). The main goal is to implement visual cues that signal to readers how to find what they need in the most efficient way possible. The three main navigation tools used by information designers are indexes, table of contents, and page numbers. Enhancing readability A recurrent theme here is readability. In simple terms, this is the ability to read and understand text. In information design, this means using and manipulating various design elements to facilitate communication between the text and the reader. The following design elements are involved. Typography The prime consideration of typography is legibility, which is centered around text anatomy. Text anatomy includes ascenders, descenders, stems, counters, and cross strokes. All of these impact readability, and the information designer must take these into account when choosing a typeface for the material. Typeface measuring tools include x-height (the height of the letters), the mean line, baseline, and cap line. These tools are used to gauge the size of the letters and the spacing between the lines. Additionally, the information designer must consider the slant of the typeface and the type stress (the angle of the thickest part of the letter). There are two basic families of fonts: serif and sans serif. There is a third category, script, but it is rarely used for much of the text, as it is more difficult to read. According to Wheildon’s 1995 study (as cited in Schriver, 1997), serif and sans serif are read with the same speed, but serif is preferred for a continuous body of text. Sans serif is preferred for PowerPoint, as the serifs are often lost or blurred in the magnification and pixilation of the projected text. Kostelnick’s 1996 study (as cited in Schriver, 1997) found that serif typefaces are generally preferred for prose, particularly the novel genre, while sans serif are preferred for instructions documents. Three facets an information designer considers when choosing a typeface are flexibility, contrast and distinctiveness. Flexibility deals with whether the font can be used for a variety of genres or purposes. Contrast is the expressiveness of the typeface; is there a notable difference when it is bolded or italicized? Distinctiveness is how characteristic the typeface is, how unique from other fonts. Beyond readability, the information designer must consider if the chosen typeface supports the intended tone of the piece. For instance, Times New Roman is typically considered more academic, so in writing an academic article, one would use this typeface rather than Marker Felt or Helvetica, which are more casual typefaces. As Schriver discusses in her work on document design (Schriver, 1997), it is crucial to determine the audience’s purpose for reading: is it for enjoyment, to assess material, to perform a task, or to learn? From there, the information designer can best determine the appropriate typeface. Organization To improve the overall structure of a document, information designers chunk information, create headings, and focus on the white space surrounding text on a page. Chunking information, or breaking text into smaller sections, not only makes a document more visually appealing, it also makes information easier to process and understand. Textbooks are a good example of information chunking - each chapter is divided into segments of information separated by headings and subheadings. Headings are an important component of organization because they signal to readers what is to follow and take the audience’s needs into consideration, as they allow one to select the most relevant information. A study by Lorch and Hyönä (2004) used eye-trackers to assess the time it took participants to read the first sentence of paragraphs with or without headings. They found that it took less time for participants to read topic sentences when there were headings than when there were not, and noted that participants were also less likely to reread the information. Headings, along with bulleted lists and indentations, establish a visual hierarchy so that the most important ideas are presented first. Headings and chunking are two important elements of document organization, but they would be useless if they were bunched together on the page. Attention to white space, therefore, is a crucial element of document organization. There should be enough white space between the lines of text, as well as around them (the margins), to help the reader skim over the document. Graphic Construction The inclusion of graphics in a text aids comprehension as well. While graphic designers focus on making the material visually appealing through the addition of graphics, information designers take it a step further. They consider how to best represent and explain the material through this use of graphics. First, these graphics must be familiar to the audience and culturally relevant. For instance, as Axtel’s 1990 study discussed (as cited in Schriver, 1997), one cannot include a picture of a tractor in a farming brochure if the audience only uses hand-ploughs. They wouldn’t understand the illustration. Second, the graphics must be arranged in a coherent sequence. This involves considering the use of space, size, position, proximity, and clarity in the picture-ordering procedure. The information designer considers how people jump around the page and skim the material; for this reason, images are used to balance the text and enhance its points. A 1967 study by Shepard (as cited in Schriver, 1997) shows that memory for pictures is better than for words. Hence, designers implement images to aid retention. There is a fine balance, however, as a striking picture can be distracting and impede understanding rather than aid it. Taking all this into consideration, information designers determine how the graphics would best aid reader comprehension. They choose what material to highlight or expand upon and when to do so. They decide if images should be redundant, complementary, supplementary, juxtapositional, or stage-setting. Further, they consider when to use color, how much space to allow around the text and the images, visual balance of images and text, and proximity of graphics to appropriate text. They also choose what type of graphs or tables to use, as well as the appearance of these graphs. As one study showed (Stewart, Cipolla, and Best, 2009), three-dimensional graphs are harder to comprehend than two-dimensional graphs because the added lines compromise data clarity. Kosslyn’s 1994 study (as cited in Schriver, 1997) found that colored graphs are easier to comprehend because they highlight the contrast between the data.