Good design for screen genre (Peer Evaluation)

Good and fine design is very important as it will affect whether a document is easy to understand or not. Good design also serves as visual representation of the information (UWG n.d). According to Nielsen (2000), design is required to allow people access to the content. Here, I will critique one of my course-mate’s Power point slides from Assignment One.

The design of this slide is quite relevant and appropriate because the background illustrates the topic of the presentation. This will help the audience to understand the topic easily. Reep (2006) mentioned that visual aids isolate the main topics and appeal mainly to general and non-expert readers. Proportion of the slide design also very suitable as the size and placement of text is readable.

According to Nielsen (2000), “reading from computer screens is about 25 percent slower than reading from paper”. Therefore, texts should be as short as possible. In this second image, the presenter shortens the summary so that the audience would have the initiate to read the texts. One slide should limit to only 5 lines or 5 points (UWG n.d) whereas this image/slide can said to be a good design of powerpoint slide.

In this slide, image is shown. Through laws of gestalt, visual take over the load of structuring and organizing the reader's processing (Bernhardt 1986). Thus, the purpose of this slide is to want the reader to focus on the image. In addition, words and pictures render the idea more fully than it alone (Schriver 1997). Hence, the presenter wants the reader to understand this slide easily.

References

Bernhardt, S.A 1986, “Seeing the text”, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 37, National Council of Teachers of English.

Nielsen, J 2000, “Content design”, Designing web usability, Ch. 3, New Riders, Indianapolis.

Reep, D.C 2006, “Document design”, Technical writing, Ch. 6, 6th ed., Pearson/Longman, New York.

Schriver, K.A 1997, “The interplay of words and pictures”, Dynamics in documents design: creating texts for readers, Ch. 6, Wiley Computer Pub., New York.

UWG Distance Ed, “Importance of Design”, Graphic Design Principles for Powerpoint, viewed 19 April 2010,

< http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ppt/gooddesign_html97/sld002.htm >