Print vs Online designing: Linking the issue of salience to their characteristics

When designing a document, conventional reading paths held by readers should not be overlooked. It is important for designers to note that readers do not show a consistent reading path between print and online material.

The characteristics
For print materials, the conventional reading path is linear(Kress & van Leeuwen 2006). The cultural background determines the linear direction it holds. For Western countries and most parts of the world, it would be from left to right while for the Arab region, it would be from right to left.

Linear reading path for print materials. (source: Philanthropy Magazine)

For online materials, the reading path follows an F-shape pattern whereby lines are read in horizontal movement and scrolled down vertically before being read in horizontal movement again. This goes to show that readers often only ‘scan’ through the web in that pattern do not read the entire content presented. Nielsen (1997) gives credence to this claim as he states that readers hardly read every word of web contents.

F-shaped reading path for online materials. (source: Nielsen 1997)

How can we link it to salience?
Having understood the differences between designing for print and for online purposes, what can we say about salience?

In my opinion, it is arguable that salience should be emphasized more for web designing. This is due to the fact that viewers merely scan through the pages and there is less reader-engagement compared to the linear reading path seen in print materials. Therefore, salient elements on the web could give rise to visual grammars that would potentially enable higher levels of reader-engagement (Walsh 2006).

Reference List

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 2006, Reading Images: Grammar of Visual Design, Routledge, London.

Nielsen, J. 1997, How Users Read the Web, viewed November 11 2009, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a/html

Walsh, M. 2006, “‘Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, p.24-37.