Some thoughts on style in visual communications

[Philip.Cohen]

"The principles of good typography are few, and can be simply stated: What is printed should be so presented that in no other way will it be as clearly read and comprehended; it should not be ostentatious, either by ugliness or by excessive ornamentation; and it should acknowledge the reader’s intelligence and taste, leaving him with the impression that what he is reading is well presented, but without making him aware of the techniques by which that effect has been achieved. . . .

"Good presentation should have no need to proclaim itself; he who shouts loudest is not necessarily heard first or most clearly.

"As a man tends to be judged by his dress and manner, so is a business enterprise judged by the appearance and style of the printed material by which it seeks to inform or influence."

Style Manual (Australian Government Publishing Service)

[tellomon]

Sign Painting Principles --*snipe*

[*Brum6y*]

I remember when colour 3270 monitors first made their way into the corporate world - you had 7 colours to choose from!

I had one of the first 3 in my company as I had some screen design work.  I played around with the colours, but soon realised 2 or 3 colours across a screen was pleasant - with maybe a 4th in one or two places for a highlight.

Any more was distracting, hard to look at and less readable - but there were some people than just had to use them all.

Technically showing off, but devoid of style.

[tellomon]

No style?

We're doomed!

[Philip.Cohen]

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell."

William Strunk Jr, The Elements of Style

[*Brum6y*]

Don't worry Tello .... things have come a ways since then.

The 3270 terminal is character based - standard mode was 24 lines of 80 characters, but there were some other modes for terminals that could handle them.  The only images you could show were made up of different characters.

Now we have high res colour monitors (what we would have called graphics screens back then).  Today, 16 million colours is considered pretty ordinary with resolutions of 1280 x 1024 common and 1600 x 1200 is no big deal.

Graphics abound, screen designs can be sophisticated, animations, interactive mousing ... a myriad of elements that can be woven into any number of possibilities, especially when coupled with the internet.

 - News items
 - A gallery of sunsets
 - eCommerce and advertising
 - someone's website selling needlecrafts to the world

 or

- a doodled piccy of drummer sitting at a bar arguing against the claim that he doesn't know Jack.....


What can I say...?

There's style and ... well ... there's style.

[Philip.Cohen]

Printing a passage in italics [or bold], like underlining one in a letter, is a primitive way of soliciting attention. The practiced writer is aware that his business is to secure prominence for what he regards as the essence of his communication by so marshalling his sentences that they lead up to a climax, or group themselves round a centre, or be worded with different degrees of impressiveness as the need of emphasis varies; he knows too that it is an insult to the reader’s intelligence to admonish him periodically by a change of type that he must now be on the alert. The true use of italics are very different from that of recommending to attention whole sentences whose importance, if they are important, ought to be plain without them.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage