Reading Reponse #3

After working on the brochure project this week, I’ve learned a little more about visual design. Because I’ve taken a few graphic design classes, a lot of what I’ve already learned goes along with the newer things that cropped up this week.

 I knew about typeface vs. font, the importance of color, and other visual elements of design. I’ve done dozens of projects that focus on these particular aspects, but the interesting part this week was applying those concepts to a more technical design. I’ve done websites, DVD covers, maps, and even food containers, but those have always been geared more towards graphic design. A brochure can easily be considered graphic design as much as technical design, but for the purpose of this class I know that it was to help us familiarize ourselves with what technical communication is, and how design can sort of insinuate itself into it.

 Because so far, it seems to me that technical communication and graphic design can often be one and the same. Visual design is as important as writing when it comes to technical communication—if you don’t have an eye-catching design, it’s pretty likely that no one’s going to want to look at your work. It needs to be well-done, appropriate to your topic, and clearly geared towards a specific audience. The same goes for writing: if an instruction manual, for example, is written all over the place with no rhyme or reason (or if it doesn’t have pictures to illustrate), it can be confusing and off-putting. No one wants to look at it, and, well, that could spell disaster for your furniture.

I feel like I’m already getting a lot out of this class because now I’m going to start looking at these projects with a technical eye as well as a graphic one. In graphic design, we always had to do research before we started a project to make sure we knew what we were doing, and we had to write up a fake memo each project that explained who our audience was and how we were going to market our product. Beyond that, time was usually spent making things look as graphically eye-catching as possible. Writing was never quite as big a deal. In this class, it’s easy to see that the writing is at least as important, if not more, than the graphic elements.