Both digital and print designs are tasked with the job to engage the viewer and to make them remember what they’ve just engaged with. To do so, Park approaches some dull texts and deciphers the redesigns of them. The commonalities seen between these, and digital designs we see daily on our computers are simple, but are not often thought of (until you are responsible for creating design). I think one of the most important, and most referred to in Park’s piece is typeface and the utilization of ‘white space’ to the designers’ benefit. Type face can change the tone and mood of a piece, solely by choosing a sans-serif font over a serif font. This consistency of a typeface can provide something for readers to remember as well. Slight variations of fonts can provide easier scanning of documents (here I thought of when I used to scan my middle school textbooks for the important bold and italicized words to do homework), but it is easy to overdo this when you also begin to mess with type size and other aspects of type. Type works with the white space by providing spacing and important breaks within the text, promoting the anti-clutter idea that Park spoke of throughout the piece. Breaking up large pieces of texts allows people to remember better as well, one of the main tasks of design. These commonalities hold true to accessible design as well. I think the stark differences between general design for the public and accessible design comes to the secondary media involved with the piece and the utilization of color.
I don’t often use media in my own designs, as I don’t think it is often necessary in contexts of my own work, but I understand how vital it can be in the digital world. I think it is absolutely possible to balance being accessible and incorporating good design in the process of designing a webpage or a digital flyer. Though it may require more time and effort, the increased accessibility creates an inclusive piece for those who may not be able to participate in all design. I think in order to do this, you’d start with the typefaces and white space previously mentioned, and then begin to include color and secondary media and the necessary text to accompany those media pieces (captions, alternative text, subtitled videos…). With color, though, you’d also want to work with the piece in its later stages in black and white to ensure the color patterns and tones within the piece are not too similar to the text or are blending in with other properties of the piece, making it difficult for those that may be colorblind to read and comprehend the piece.
In theory, the daunting task of making design accessible sounds like it would be impossible, or that the aspects of accessibility and “good design” would ‘clash’, but taking the design process step by step, starting with the commonalities between good design, general texts and accessible texts, it is definitely possible and should more often be thought of in the design process when it comes to audience.
I think people are often intimidated by accessibility, but I think you capture well the importance in overcoming a fear of “it’s too much!” by breaking down the (often) fairly easy ways we can work toward providing more accessible texts. I see that at work in your final paragraph:
‘In theory, the daunting task of making design accessible sounds like it would be impossible, or that the aspects of accessibility and “good design” would ‘clash’, but taking the design process step by step, starting with the commonalities between good design, general texts and accessible texts, it is definitely possible and should more often be thought of in the design process when it comes to audience.’
I think “alternative texts” is where people get tripped up. But that sounds scarier than it is. Usually, it means things like subtitles or adding a 200 word description of an image. What does “taking the design process step by step” look like in terms of calming people’s fears about the “work” of being accessible? What do you think?
I liked your ideology of typeface in this article. As a student who is required to read articles and textbooks often, I have found I dislike long, word-filled pages with relatively minimal pictures on them. First, I am a visual learner, so I prefer to have images and graphs represent what I am learning about; second, too much text on a page becomes daunting and almost makes me feel I may be wasting my time reading all of it. I have never really thought about the impact font choice and blank space has in a piece of literature. This may be correlated to my own stimulus, but I feel that many assignments we have in college neglect to have the expectation to make a document visually appealing. Rather, many professors just want to hone in on the material and give a grade solely based on the information provided. One specific example is the First Year Engineering Conference Paper, where it requires a whole entity of formatting and neglecting to abide by it results in a penalty to your grade. If the administrators were to open up the formatting guidelines, perhaps the papers may not appear as dull and encourage students to think outside of the box.
I agree that making a piece of literature more accessible requires more time and effort, however if you want to connect to your general audience and appeal to the public, you need to recognize the end goal. You want to draw them in, and this could be promoted through a variety of ways. Give them something appealing, yet what they are not expecting – this can intrigue them and make them spend more time with your piece of work.
I found it very interesting that in your last paragraph, you said “In theory, the daunting task of making design accessible sounds like it would be impossible, or that the aspects of accessibility and “good design” would ‘clash’,” because I definitely think I am guilty of this. I always thought that in order to make a piece of writing more “accessible” or inclusive would detract from its design (or, at least, some of the audience would not be able to appreciate that design). You make a good point, though, that following a strong design process can allow people who know what they’re doing to create a design that is also accessible and inclusive.
Also, you point out that you (and probably most of our class, myself included) do not often use media in our designs. I agree that it is not necessary, but does that mean it couldn’t be beneficial in some way? Just a thought, but I think it would be interesting to see how that could be incorporated into our blog posts.
Overall, though, great piece! You raise some good, thought-provoking points about how we all can make our work more accessible to all of our audience, even those who would otherwise not be able to fully appreciate it.
I really like how you broke down Parker’s text into a larger context in this post. I think that you bring up good points about typeface and the use of media in designs to make them more accessible. I like how you took the many different aspects of making designs accessible and shed light on how to incorporate those aspects into “good designs”.
In your second paragraph, you said said, “I think it is absolutely possible to balance being accessible and incorporating good design in the process of designing a webpage or a digital flyer. Though it may require more time and effort, the increased accessibility creates an inclusive piece for those who may not be able to participate in all design.” I completely agree with this statement. While it may be more time consuming and require a bit more effort, there is not reason that most if not all designs can be accessible for all people to interact with media.
In your last paragraph, you wrapped the whole post up really nicely by offering the solution to take the process step by step. You bring up the idea of accessible design and good design clashing, but remedy it by telling the reader to think about each process you touched on when they’re making their design. Great post!