Design Issues III

Interactive Print Design -- Bah! Humbug!

By Cheryl Stephens

In this paper, I will explore a new development in information design: "interactive print design" in typography (the style and appearance of printed matter). Interactive print design requires the reader to work at constructing the text and the message within it. This demand on the reader runs counter to other trends in communication and information design. I explore here the competing views, and recommend that empirical research is necessary but unlikely to resolve the issue.

Background

This is a development with more than one source. Professionals approaching design from various fields have contributed to the trend itself and offer their own philosophic justifications for or against it. Typographers, desktop publishers, artists, designers, and media consultants have heralded the new interactive trend in design as "youth-oriented" and responsive to the infotainment expectations of youth. Magazines aimed at a youth market have adopted this design approach: Wired, Ray Gun, Bikini. Other magazines aimed at audience of artists and designers use it: Eye, Octavo, Emigre. Some magazines use variants of the new design while still following some of the classical guidelines: Details, Vancouver, Spy.

Document design standards adopted by technical communicators and plain language communicators reflect results of legibility research and user-testing over the past forty years. The prevailing page design regimen revolves around the handling of several variables: type font, type size, margins, line length and spacing.

What is Interactive Design?

The "interactive" nature of the style demands first that the reader take apart the design to re-constitute the linear text. Then the reader must decode or decipher the message in the text. Richard Poynor, a typographer, identifies "the next wave" of typography and layout as one in which the reader must work to process the text, where the: "aim is to provoke multiple rather than fixed readings, to provoke the reader into becoming an active participant in the construction..."(Poynor 9)

Michel de Boer describes the aim: "This is at the centre of the studio's philosophy --that design would not be too easy, either to do or to see. The receiver of the message should be made to work, forcing them to think about what they see." (Stiff 238) Bridget Wilkins opposes the "passive and comfortable approach" to design, claiming "If it is easy to read it bypasses the visual potential of the message." (Stiff 239)

This approach also has been labelled "Deconstructionist": "This deconstructionist typography creates a much more dynamic printed page, with surprising juxtapositions and simultaneous layerings of disparate information." (MacKenzie, Changing 11) For the post-modernist, like Jon R. Snyder:

"Hermeneutics (literally, `the science of interpretation') attempts to discover -- or, better still, recover -- the truth of a text or a work of art through an act of interpretation. ... This means that everything we encounter in our experience of the world is no more and no less than an interpretation -- things in the world are always interpreted into the terms of our own subjective values, and thus the only world that can ever be known is a world of difference (that is, a world of interpretations). (Vattimo xxxvii)

On a practical level, interactive design requires the reader to learn and apply new text-processing techniques. The reader must learn new typefaces -- new configurations for the familiar letters of the alphabet. (Beautiful Typefaces advertisement in Black + White, Poyner) The reader may have to get a red felt- tip marker to stroke across the type to "decode" or bring the text "up" for reading (Spy, April 1995, 71-72)

Interactive design is non-linear. There may be text columns of varying sizes and directions. The reader may have to turn his or her head or rotate the page to get the necessary orientation to read the text (recent Benneton dress ads). The text columns may flow across the mid-section from page to page overleaf instead of filling a given page. (Wired: "Electric Word")

Interactive design is layered -- although it is not physically possible to layer anything in a two-dimensional format. The effect is that disparate columns become intertwined or shuffled together: one must "read between the lines" of one article to "follow the thread" of another article. Interactive print design fills the page with graphics and with a multitude of type-fonts and sizes and many colours which are vivid or contrasting or both.

Classifying Information by Personal Significance

The interactive style of design assumes that all information is of equal priority to readers. It demands the same design approach to entertainment as to reference information. While the interactive style has not yet been applied to legal, medical, or safety information, the reason for that may be that generally designers are not employed in the delivery of such information. This situation may change for reasons discussed below.

The information needs of the public in current life are varied. In Information Anxiety, information designer Richard Saul Wurman has categorized the types of information that are communicated to audiences as: Internal Information, Conversational Information, Reference Information, News Information, Cultural Information. Wurman visualizes the needs for these types of information as concentric circles radiating outward from the individual. Each type has a different level of immediacy which may vary with individuals.

"The third ring is reference information. This is where we turn for the information that runs the systems of our world --science and technology-- and, more immediately, the reference materials to which we turn in our own lives. Reference information can be anything from a textbook on quantum physics to the telephone book or a dictionary.

"The fourth ring is news information. This encompasses current events--the information that is transmitted via the media about people, places, and events that may not directly affect our lives, but can influence our vision of the world... Although there ar specific characteristics inherent to the transmission of information at each of these levels, their systems are remarkably similar and often they are fraught with the same problems and pitfalls. Within each is the potential for anxiety. And cumulatively, the grappling with information at each of these levels can weigh us down and induce a state of helplessness. It can paralyze thinking and prevent learning." (Wurman 43-45)

Maureen MacKenzie is a Senior Research Associate with the Communications Research Institute of Australia. She acknowledges the need to find the appropriate typography for different types of information:

"Optimum legibility is therefore conditional on the context of use and the reading habits of those who will use the information. What readers find acceptable in one genre of document, such as a newspaper, or insurance policy is not appropriate in either a novel or a youth culture magazine. If we want to make effective documents, we must use typography appropriately to meet the needs of our target audience and the context in which our documents will be used." (MacKenzie Changing 13)

MacKenzie assumes that only "youth culture" information will be subjected to interactive design. In fact, Wurman's last three categories of information have been subjected to interactive design so far. Magazines like Wired, while obviously produced by a younger generation for a younger generation, are read for computer news and reference information by older readers. To date examples exist of this style being applied to notices about community and cultural events and to product brochures. (Poyner, Bagin and my personal collection). The possibility exists that this style will be applied to reference information (and damn the reader to anxiety over very significant information about their own lives).

Classifying Audiences by Age

Research has shown that certain techniques and styles are suitable for readers over the age of 40, and others, for those of later years. These techniques are required by the physical changes that the size, sensitivity, perceptual acuity, elasticity, and nerve cell functions of the mature readers:

"When preparing documents for over 40s we need to compensate for deteriorating vision by building in sufficient contrast and differentiation between figure and ground, to increase visibility for the aging reader. This is in fact the reverse of the process of creating the layered 'quick bite' texts which appear to be appropriate for younger readers." (MacKenzie Appropriate 14)

Studies in the 1960s indicated readers were able to read text more easily and quickly with serif typefaces. Recent Australian studies suggest that the readers in the 1990s have become familiar with sans serif typefaces and no longer experience difficulties with them. (MacKenzie Changing 12) The typography that "works" for any given group of readers may be whatever they became familiar with.

Street quick-bites of information, trained on video games, and adept with feature-laden, complex, windowed environments on their computers -- demands a different standard of design and a more complex typography. MacKenzie offers this view:

"From personal observations and informal research with educators in secondary and tertiary institutions it appears likely that the "TV generation" are developing different ways of reading and processing visual information to preceding generations. Not restricted to reading sequentially and contiguously, the Post-modern and post-Post-modern generations appear to have developed what we might call "quick-grab literacy -- the ability to absorb multiple hybrid visual codes and quick bytes of instant information." (MacKenzie Changing 12)

And Timothy Leary asserts we are on the verge of a whole new dimension of humanity based on an evolution in communications capabilities:

"Personal computers that evolve from contraptions to companions in less than one human lifespan are part of an overall acceleration of the biospheres systems for becoming conscious enough to take control. The cellular circuit resonates with the neural circuit, the communication circuit, the computation circuit, and the whole planet waking up to itself in the nick of time." (Laurel 230)

Perspectives on Interactive Print Design

The views on this development and its sources are varied and reflect existing professional perspectives.

Plain-Language Movement

Since 1970, governments, businesses, and lawyers have adopted the consumer movement's interest in improving the language in business and legal documents intended for the average consumer or citizen. Design and typography of such information has always been addressed along with language concerns. Thirty-six U.S. states have legislated clear language requirements. Many of these regulations set specific requirements for type face or size, especially to eliminate the "small print" so often complained of in legal documents. (see B.C. Motor Vehicle Dealers Regulations)

The goal of professionals in today's plain language movement is to promote communication through understandable words, images, and design. According to a mission statement, the Plain Language Society of B.C. aims to "promote the use of language that meets the needs of the intended audience so people can understand information important to their lives". Plain language advocates favour the modern typography:

"When you select type for your publication, use comfortable typography. Don't make readers work too hard to understand you. When you plan your typography, ...To be effective, text should be easy-going on the eyes. In fact, the typeface should be somewhat invisible, subordinate to the message." (Bagin)

Bagin blames the visually jumbled, interactive approach to typography on the wide availability of the new desktop publishing programs:

"Flexible software and powerful computers have given all of us the freedom to select typefaces with the click if a button. Unfortunately for some, whim and the desire to be different have seized control, overtaking common sense and balance." (Bagin)

Paul Stiff develops this further:

"We should pause to remember that the challenging problems in typography (let alone information design) are not much connected with what professional designers do or don't do. This is because most designing is done by people who are not professional designers. It is done by secretaries, teachers, office managers, hospital clerks, librarians, meteorologists, computer service administrators, nurses, engineers, and social workers; and they have to write and design notices, forms, signs, instruction manuals, guides, reports, articles, and so on. These people often can't afford the services of professional typographers, so don't get much, or indeed any, help from them."(Stiff 231)

With an interactive, deconstructionist, and post-modern design set as a model, these untrained information designers are going even further in their experimentation Â-to the disadvantage of their readers.

Post-Modern Design and Typography

Social philosophers and political commentators chose to see the new style of design as another expression of post-modernism. To this end, they must classify the prevailing style standard, which has become the plain language and legal standard, as "modern" and give it artistic and political roots.

"Modernist thinking encouraged the belief that if the message was presented clearly and legibly then communication would take place. The work that was done in Europe by the Bauhaus and Swiss typography movement are excellent examples of this clean, clear approach to graphic communication... Post-modern and constructionist theory allow us to understand that meaning can only be generated when the reader engages with the printed words. We now understand that meaning, and thus communication, is brought into being by the interactive relationship between the reader and the document." (MacKenzie, Changing 11)

Michele-Anne Dauppe explains that interactive design is post-modern because its purpose is to: "engage the audience with the text, to make the audience `work', and to emphasise the `construction' of meaning. Radical typography might aim, not to flow seamlessly, legibly, but to halt and disrupt, to expose meaning and language as problematic." (Stiff 239)

It is certainly post-modern in the way it brings the background to the foreground and treats disparate elements as of equal importance in such a way as to "destructure" the essence of the message. As Jon R. Snyder introduces the views of post-modernist Gianni Vattimo:

"Hermeneutic ontology, however, maintains that there is no longer any fixed difference between essence and appearance, subject and object, or centre and periphery, and that therefore `the occurrence of Being is ... an unnoticed and marginal event which takes place in the background in the post- modern era. ... Everything in the work of art is ornament or decor, insofar as the post-modern work of art, like post-modern Being itself, has no essence or centre which could then be used to distinguish what is proper to the work from what is inessential or marginal to it. ... ornament `becomes the central element of aesthetics and, in the last analysis, of ontological meditation itself.'" (Vattimo xxxii- xxxiii)

According to Snyder's comments here, the interactive design attack on linearity makes this style post-modern:

"The philosophy of post-modernity seeks to shake off the `logic of overcoming, development, and innovation' that has been elaborated and sustained by modernity, although the meaning of this effort is not altogether clear, for it leaves us uncertain as to what the shape of history or even the nature of time itself would be without such a familiar and reassuring logic. Nevertheless, the aesthetic model of a discontinuous historicity outlined above suggests that there are indeed possible ways of experiencing history and time other than those supplied by modernity. The domain of the arts, in particular, has seen an intensive search in our century for a means by which to break free of linearity in representing temporal and historical processes." (Vattimo, xxxvi)

Stiff suggests that the myth of the "passive reader" is just another excuse for the designer to do as she pleases, which he calls the "designer-centred ideology" which works at cross-purposes to "user-centred communication design". (Stiff 238) Certainly, a focus on "the other" or "communal needs" is more modern than post-modern.

Fine Art and High Art Design

Graphic designer and Vancouver Community College instructor Albert Dell said in a recent conversation that "classic graphic design" is based on the ease-of- reading principle. By contrast, he says that the newer trend is to apply fine-art principles to page design and typography. This approach does not concern itself with readability. Instead, it allows the graphic designer to express himself or herself as an artist. A former architect familiar with this historical development in both fields, Wurman says:

"I am concerned with public access to experience and to information, with giving people new ways to look at their environment, their lives. In fact, I regard myself as a teacher about physical and emotional experience, one who communicates via a printed page that has been stretched to new applications. And as a teacher I want to test my ideas about how people learn to decode experience, especially experience that relies on visual understanding--shape, color, relationships between objects and empty space." (Wurman 47)

The role he describes is that of an artist --but in this case an artist of information. Wurman addressed the high art approach:

"The language of information transmission is laden with traps that lead us away from the concerns of performance and toward anxiety, confusion, and misunderstandings... Looking good is being good. The disease of looking good is confusing aesthetics with performance. A piece of information performs when it successfully communicates an idea, not when it is delivered in a pleasing manner. Information without communication is not information at all. It is an extremely common, insidious malady among graphic designers and architects to confuse looking good with being good. The cure obviously is to ask how something performs."(Wurman 125)

An artist of information has a motivation outside himself. The fine artist applying his skills to information delivery takes liberties necessary to express his inner turmoil --behave like a brat.

Wurman quotes from a conversation with Ed Schlossberg, museum exhibition designer:

"I think that the idea of letting these spoiled brats design things which are awards to their own ingenuity is outrageous. The task of a museum is to create an event that doesn't tell you how wonderful the designers are, but instead provides a context where you can feel better about and understand the people around you. I think the thing that was so wonderful about Shakespeare was that in addition to being a great writer, he knew that his audience was full of drunken kids and very fine ladies and that all of them came from different levels, so he tried to entertain all of them at different times. So many things that we do are really geared to a specific audience-- other designers or very wealthy people. The fact is that they are a very exclusive, small segment of things. It shouldn't be a choice between mass or class, and it should be a choice to do something well that has broader appeal. (Wurman 132-33)

Stiff complains of Hermann Zapf's assertion that "typographic creativity can be expanded... as long as it is controlled by people with knowledge and taste" because it is an elitist and "unashamed appeal to the authority of taste: he means people like him, but not me, and certainly not you." (Stiff 239)

Digital Design Approaches

Young people have learned to read, play and work with interactive video and computer programs and have come to expect similar style in printed materials. The developing multi-media environment aggravates the problem Gary Emery, an Australian typographer, poses for typographers, to: "confront television and film media on their own terms and compete aggressively for attention". (MacKenzie Changing 14)

One expert on computer software design suggests that the jumble and clutter of some computer program screens is unnecessary and undesirable. Theodor Nelson discusses "elements of bad design" and

"featuritis and clutter... [which] is taking on new forms. In the popular iconic world, it becomes a new style of screen clutter. You face a screen littered with cryptic junk: the frying pan, the yo-yo, the bird's nest, the high-button shoe. Or whatever. You must learn the nonobvious aspects of a lot of poorly designed screen furniture and the visual toys: what they actually do, rather than what they suggest. You must explore the details of each until you understand what it `really' means. In the old days, you tried to understand the various input commands and their maze of options. Today, you try to understand what the icon means." (Laurel 236)

Nelson is credited with first conceptualizing the interconnected information web that hypertext has permitted. He alludes to the limitations of the past when the computer screen was limited by a conceptual link to two-dimensional paper:

"Once we leave behind `two-dimensionality' (virtual paper) and even `three-dimensionality' (virtual stacks), we step off the edge into another world, into the representation of the true structure and interconnectedness of information. To represent this true structure, we need to indicate multidimensional connection and multiple connections between entities."

He then discusses what is desirable in future:

"Tomorrow's new principles will involve both old concepts and new, fitting under new principles of visualization. These new principles must and will be lucid, vivid, and obvious, once you have seen them. They will be spatial because a screen is spatial, indicating multiple connection and multidimensional connections." (Laurel 241)

Nelson recognizes that two-dimensional paper has internal limitations and cannot be treated like a multi-media environement. The opposite position is reflected in MacKenzie's comment here:

"The digital technology of recent decades has allowed a revolution in the look of the printed page. New generations of computer designers are challenging the traditional typographic assumptions of previous generations, by turning text into a set of visual elements to be taken apart, visually interfered with and reconstructed in a way that challenges readers to put it together for themselves to figure out the meanings." (MacKenzie, Changing 11)

Stiff explains one approach to this:

"It may be more productive to think of style as something which appears as a constitutive art of every communicative event, as the visible consequence of a position adopted -- intentionally or not -- by writers and designers in relation to the readers which they imagine. So style is two-way: it may be initiated by writers and designers, but is actively re- interpreted by readers." (Stiff 235)

Unfortunately the reader is as often forgotten or ignored as "imagined". Discussing the different approaches to document design taken by electronic publishers and traditional craft typographers, Stiff discusses the missing reader and the question whether the writer's logic can be communicated to the reader:

"This raises all sorts of sticky questions about writers' intentions and their visible realization, and about the relevance of those intentions to readers' own purposes and questions. But the sticky questions are no sooner implied than forgotten. It follows that when actual documents and their appearance do get discussed, the lack of productive models of what readers do when they interact with them means that the terms available for that discussion are usually the most simplistic kind of `aesthetic' preferences. And while there may well be aesthetic components to writers' intentions and readers' expectations, these may not be enough to support a productive approach to, let alone a theory of, the design of effective documents." (Stiff 233)

Discussing the disastrous results of putting computer programmers in charge of "the artistic integration of the mechanisms they work with", Nelson said:

"It is nice that engineers and programmers and software executives have found a new form of creativity in which to find a sense of personal fulfillment. It is just unfortunate that they have to inflict the results on users." (Laurel 243)

No Resolution is At Hand

The plain language approach to document design which is adopted for important safety, health, business, and legal information may not be of general application to all audiences or purposes.

The Bauhaus style may appeal to the older person because it accommodates the reader's physical deterioration. It may appeal to those over 40 years because it is the style of the texts from which they learned to read. If Bagin is correct about the interactive style, it doesn't work for older readers:

"Unfortunately for some, whim and the desire to be different have seized control, overtaking common sense and balance. ... The effect cancels itself out, creating a frenzy that doesn't communicate."

The question is whether Bagin is expressing denial and resistance arising from generational anathema of plain language advocates toward interactive design.

MacKenzie lauds interactive design. It is easy to agree with her assessment:

"For successful communication to take place we need to engage and sustain the attention of the reader. While it may be appropriate to provoke the youthful reader to participate in the construction of the message, aging generations are more likely to become engaged with documents that are inviting because they are easier on the eye." (MacKenzie Appropriate 14)

Once engaged visually by exciting design, do young readers need linearity and structural logic to grasp meaning? Research remains to be done, and needs to be done, to find what styles and techniques will both arouse the interest of youthful readers and facilitate their understanding of the text. It seems the youthful reader has greater physical abilities and different cultural expectations. It is yet to be determined whether their actual information processing skills are different. Even those who advocate for interactive design as post-modern expression admit that it may not facilitate communication:

"To date, little research has been published discussing how teenagers are interacting with deconstructed printed texts. We do not yet understand whether the younger generation is developing new ways of constructing meaning from such texts, or indeed, whether they even do generate meaning." (MacKenzie Changing 12)

It remains to be seen whether the type of design that requires the readers active participation in interpreting text is suitable for delivery of reference rather than pleasurable information. Yet the advocates of the interactive print design do not hesitate to use it and to promote it. Wurman cautions:

"The information traps ... exist because people take them for granted... We accept that tax forms should be confusing, legal documents should be written in legalese, and that we should spend hours everyday trying to decipher charts and graphs." (Wurman 135)

Friedrich Nietzsch, in The Gay Science, said:

"Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. He is a thinker; that mans, he knows how to make things simpler than they are..." (Wurman 134)

It has been a "given" in technical communication that an information designer should make things more apparent than they are, and the graphic designer should make the internal structure or logic transparent. Whether this is also necessary for facilitation of information-processing by the younger generation needs to be determined. Stiff suggests that even with research results available, the high art and post-modern designers will not change their approach. Their approach has been consistent in spite of research detrimental to it. Stiff reached back to 1968 to the Working Party on Typographic Teaching:

"Inadequacies in teaching mostly stem from the treatment of the subject as a form of personal visual expression .. the emphasis on so-called originality often results in mere stylishness which disguises a complete absence of original thinking." (Stiff 240)

And, to 1977 to quote Michael Macdonald Ross and Eleanor Smith:

"We have been astonished to find that most experimental psychologists dismiss the experience of practitioners with scorn; and equally astonished to hear famous designers say that no experimental findings at all are of the slightest use to them. ... We see here two epistemologies (knowledge from controlled experiments vs. knowledge from personal trial and experience) and two tasks (universal knowledge vs. particular solutions). The question is, shall these differences continue to cause misunderstanding, or can they be mutually supportive?"(Stiff 240)

Timothy Leary may have pinpointed the thinking error that permits the argument that print media must change to mirror the incredible multimedia capacities of computer screens. Leary says:

"The screen is where the interpersonal, interactive consciousness of the worldmind is emerging. ... The personal computer is based on the way individual people deal with ideas and information; the interpersonal computer interface will be based on how people communicate with one another. Realizing the full potential of the human-to-human model will require a strong new interpersonal perspective." (Laurel 232)

And this may lead us to question whether reading print media is interpersonal communication or merely self-expression. The interconnectedness of people that is the point of communication and the internal structure of information that is to be communicated militate against the assertion that the designer may force the reader to construct both the surface features and the essential meaning of the writer's message. As Schlossberg said above: "So many things that we do are really geared to a specific audience--other designers or very wealthy people. The fact is that they are a very exclusive, small segment of things." We should take the same attitude toward interactive design, first to determine if it is suitable for younger audiences for all purposes, and, second, to learn whether it will work for broader audiences.

References

Bagin, Carolyn Boccella, "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" Clearly Better, 1, No. 1 (1994) Center for Clear Communication, Rockville, Maryland.

Leary, Timothy "The Interpersonal, Interactive, Interdimensional Interface", Timothy Leary, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Editor: Brenda Laurel, Don Mills, Ontario, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1990

MacKenzie, Maureen, "Our changing visual environment: Questions and challenges", Communication News, 7, No. 4 (1994) 11-14, the Communications Research Institute of Australia, Hackett, Aus.

"Appropriate typography", Communication News, 7 No. 5/6 (1994), 13-14, the Communications Research Institute of Australia, Hackett, Aus.

Nelson, Theodor Holm, "The Right Way to Think About Software Design", The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Editor: Brenda Laurel, Don Mills, Ontario, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1990

Poynor, Rick, and Edward Booth-Clibborn, eds. Typography Now: The Next Wave, Ohio: F&W Publications, Inc., 1991

"Rapport on Plain Language Lay-out: Guidelines and Choices", Rapport: News about plain language, 4 (1992), Vancouver: Rapport Communications

Stiff, Paul, "Structuralists, stylists, and forgotten readers", Information design journal, 7 (1994) 227-241

Vattimo, Gianni, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, translated and with an introduction by Jon R. Snyder, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1988

Wurman, Richard Saul, Information Anxiety: What to do when information doesn't tell you what you need to know, New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1990

© 2000 Cheryl Stephens All rights reserved.

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