Which of those pages looks readable? I don’t mean, “Do you understand what they say?” I mean, “Which page layout can you follow?”
Your answer may reflect your generation. For more examples, look here.
Fifteen years ago, I watched my godson (age 9) read a Nintendo Power magazine. To me, the words and the pictures seemed to be thrown onto the page. Just looking at the salad-like layout, I squirmed and looked away.
I knew Bill didn’t love reading. I asked him how he could read Nintendo Power pages. He said, “Don’t you know how to read comic strips? This page works the same way.”
Today’s Nintendo Power (above) has text that is laid out a bit more like The New Yorker. But how does the text relate to the pictures? In what order should I look at the pix? In them, I see a "3" and a "2," but what do the numbers mean? And have you looked at a book-format Japanese anime?
Today, language pundits speculate whether “texting” will ruin written English. But no one is asking whether "screening" changes our eyes. Computers (games, websites, and blogs) instill their layout expectations into human brains. Does the next generation read a different-looking page than we older folks do?
When it comes to reading pages, I’m a top-down, left-to-right person. I want each picture “tied to” its caption.
I bring format expectations to what I read.
But so does my godson. And he’s out of college now. Will his generation reinvent the page?
2 comments:
Which of the "5-Paragraph" examples is supposed to appeal to which generation?
I prefer the the black-and-white one because it is laid out more neatly and labeled more clearly and prominently.
The one with the colored boxes and arrows is okay once I understand the significance of the different box formats and so forth, but even then, I think it still needs to be aligned properly and the boxes laid out in a more meaningful way. (Color-coding can be problematic for people with certain vision problems, but that's a separate issue.)
I'm just wondering if preferring the BW layout means that I'm an old fogey or a young fogey!
As you can guess, I left it up to readers to decide which format appeals to which generation. I think you can guess.
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