Online vs Print

There have some differences of designing for print and online document. The way of readers reading are different. Jakob Nielsen stated that the way of reader reading in a web page is according to “F shape”. He also believed that the readers are will first read in a horizontal movement in the top of the webpage then second horizontal and the last read in a vertical movement.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Compare to print such as books or magazines, all text is linear. Linear text is referring that the readers have no choice but to read the whole thing (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006). All the elements post different places without any changes. The text in the print document can be work as “information genres”. (Walsh, 2006)

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/07_01/hallowsPA_468x681.jpg

http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/

In the other hand, “The reader can choose different pathway depending on their interest”. This is happen when reader read the webpage. (Walsh, 2006) Readers are not going to read your webpage according word by word. (Jakob Nielsen, 2006) Therefore, the designer for webpage must used different modes to attract the attentions of the readers such as animation, video clips and so on. Beside that, the first two paragraph of web page is important to grab the reader’s attention because most of the readers only read first two paragraphs. (Jakob Nielsen, 2006)

The similarity between the print and the online document is the meaning making. (Walsh, 2006) This means that the meaning they wish to express will be same as there purpose is same as well.

References List:

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

Walsh, M 2006, The 'textual shift': Examining the reading process with print and visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literarcy, vol. 29, no. 1, p.24-37.

Nielsen, J 2006, F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content, viewed 5 November 2008,
<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html>