Good design principles are essential in any and all public media. Most clearly, it is pertinent that the writer puts the most emphasize on texts that captures the document as a whole. Depending on the type of public writing that is being done, this could mean a company’s name, a date of an event, or the title of the paper is bolded, in larger font relative to the body, or surrounded by white space. Another commonality between good print and digital media is structure and concision. The body of the text should have a good flow to it, whether it is for a paper or an ad, and should use shorter words and sentences to directly get the point across in the quickest time possible.
Accessible texts and good design go hand in hand. In the previous paragraph, I talked about a few principles that well designed media have in common. Ironically, good media design is the way that it is so readers have better accessibility to the most important information. Once the design is settled, the actual text may be put in, but the design is based around the actual text and what is most important. Headers are larger than the body so the reader can see if they want to bother reading the body, and the most important information is surrounded by white space so the reader’s eye is drawn to it. Park said that in text-heavy documents, readability should be the writer’s primary concern. Here, it is utterly essential that the strategic use of white space, bolded and enlarged headers, and shorter text, possibly a column approach, is used. The act of eye-drawing and the use of white space can easily be achieved in print and digital media.
Colors are also vital in the good design of media. In the Basic Color Theory article, Harmony is described as the dynamic equilibrium between the blandness of extreme unity and the chaos of extreme complexity. Our brains reject the information read when the media is on either extreme of the color harmony scale. The blandness of color can also relate to the blandness of design. For example, a long, text-based document with one font and little whitespace may be so mundane to look at, our brains won’t retain any of the text. On the other hand, a crazy document with a bunch of different sized texts and fonts may be too much for our brains to handle. An organized color scheme can help alleviate either extreme.
In general, I’ve come to the conclusion that the balance between good design and accessibility is not a 50/50 split. It is more of a 60/40, in good design’s favor. Although what the writer chooses to make accessible is most likely the reason for writing the piece, it cannot become accessible without good design. I think the best choice the writer has is to sort their information separately, then combine. In order to cut down time from the redesign process, organizing their thoughts and creating a template for their piece should be done separately, then putt the text into the template while prioritizing what the reader needs to see. Good design, when done right, works in favor of accessibility.
Building off your correlation between color and good media design, I completely agree that blandness as well as complexity can cause the mind to reject the information. The mind tends to accept that which is visually pleasing, and will reject all else because it is identified as non-organizable. Therefore, Color Harmony is defined as the best medium between the two polarities (bland and complex) to attract the reader and maintain the reader’s attention. For example, a color scheme based on colors next to each other on the color wheel (analogous colors), colors directly opposite ends of the color wheel (complementary colors), or colors found in nature are most aesthetically pleasing.
Another concept to mention about Basic Color Theory is the ideology of Color Context. This gives the author more perspective when dealing with colors on top of other colored backgrounds. For example, when dealing with such a brilliant color such as red, it will tend to pop against any color. However, if red is contrasted against a dark color such as black and a light color such as white, the black will intensify the brightness of red while white dulls the red. One last important piece of knowledge that Color Context has to offer is that contrasting a color against itself in a different shade evokes a sense of warmth or coolness depending on the reader’s perspective; BUT, if you have a reader that is color blind, you make irritate them.