Design For Readability

Why do we need to think about design?

We often think about visual design as simply making something look nicer, like a beautiful dress, an iconic building, or a sporty car. The Lamborghini Countach was one of the most iconic cars of the 80s. Nearly every boy of my generation grew up with this car on their walls or their school folders. The gullwing doors were sexy, the wide flat profile was strong, and all those squares and diagonal lines were daring compared to the rounded designs of the previous generations. Even the headlights were square, and they popped up when you needed them and folded away when you didn't. One might say it was very well designed.

But, good luck getting in without banging your head on the door. Good luck getting in at all if you're over 6'. And good luck getting it out of your garage, because with no rear window, this is what you have to do to back it up.

Yep, open the door, prop yourself up on the shoulder of the seat so you can pop up your head and see over the car while stretching your toe to still reach the gas pedal. Not so sexy any more is it?

This is a clear case where all the good looks in the world didn't help make it more functional or easy to use. 

In education, design has just as much to do with how functional and effective something is as it does with how slick it looks. This is especially true when we're working with a primarily visual medium like page layout, document design, and building effective presentation slides. Using good design technique even helps to make your content pages more accessible as well. In this module we're going to take a look at visual design as it pertains to making our instrucitional materials more funcional. Specifically, how to use elements of design to improve the readability of our canvas pages and course documents.

Start by watching the interview below with SFCC Graphic Design instructor Greg Stiles to learn about some basic elements of design, and then in the next pages we'll take a look at how to put some of those elements to use in creating more readable Canvas content pages.