Web Designing
According to Nielsen (2006), our eyes move at amazing speeds across a website’s words in a pattern that's very different from what we have learnt in school. This pattern forms an F shape pattern for reading web content which means that users might not necessarily read the text thoroughly. As justified by Walsh (2006), written texts are only one part of multimodal texts, no longer the dominant part. Therefore, engagement of audience can be captured through not only text, but audio-visual elements as well. With this, online layouts are more compact, bulleted, structured with hypertexts and easy to scan compared to print layouts (Nielsen, 1997).
Web design is compact, easy to scan and navigational.Print Designing
According to Shriver (1997, pp.372), people engage with prose linearly, one word at a time. Print layouts comprise of three signifying systems; information value, salience and framing in order to achieve a coherent and meaningful whole (Kress & Leuween 2006, pp.188). This leads to print design as being structured, static and more conventional than web design. Less thought to text, design, format and navigation is given to a print layout compared to web layout. However, writing now involves more typeface choices and layout (Kress & Leuween 2006, pp.187) which brings about a change in conventional print layout.
Print design is structured and organized in linear positions._____________________________________________________________
References
Gunther, K, Theo, VL 1998, Approaches to media discourse, Blackwell, Oxford
Nielsen, J 2006, F-shaped pattern for reading web content, Alertbox, viewed 5 November 2008, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
Nielsen, J 1997, Be succinct: writing for the web, Alertbox, viewed 5 November 2008, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html
Shriver, K 1997, Dynamics in document design: creating texts for readers, Wiley Computer Pub, New York
Walsh, M 2006, The textual shift: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, pp. 24-37
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