Document Design

This posting will discuss about what is a good document and talk about the good writing for presentation.

Documents are used by people in several countries and continents for communicating and collaborating. A design document is a way for you to communicate with others what your design decisions are and why your decisions are good decisions. The major factor that determines if your design document is good is whether or not it clearly explains your intentions. Document design is including elements that are relevant to different contexts and coding the document to allow elements to display or not, as appropriate. (Lynch & Horton, N.D.) Diagrams are a nice tool for visualizing your design, but it cannot convey the motivation behind your design decisions. That's why it is so important to let diagrams supplement your design document, not be your design document. (Hackett, 2007)

In my group presentation earlier, our slides are just list out the point and didn't do a diagram to elaborate and also overlook our document design. Therefore, I think our presentation is seem to be so boring. Yet after starting to do this weblog, I just realised the design is so important. I will do more research and practice to improve myself in this aspect.

Credibility is important for Web users nowadays. It can be increased by high-quality graphics, good writing, and use of outbound hypertext links. (Nielsen, J 1997) So that, a good writing will permit your readers to concentrate on your ideas, and may help you to give the impression that you know what you are talking about. Good scientific and technical writing should written for a direct and specified purpose that remain unchanged and conveyed without information loss, regardless of its audience. (Rothman, S 2005) Scientific writing should focus equally on both the empirical evidence and the rational or logic behind the meaning attached to the results. (Rothman, S2005)

reference lists:

1. Hackett, S 2007, How to Write an Effective Design Document, viewed 6 April 2009, <http://blog.slickedit.com/?p=43>
   
2. Lynch & Horton, N.D., Document Design, viewed 6 April 2009, <http://webstyleguide.com/wsg3/7-page-design/2-document-design.html>
   
3. Nielsen, J 1997, How Users Read on the Web, viewed 5 April 2009, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html>
   
4. Rothman, S 2005, What Makes Good Scientific and Technical Writing?, viewed 5 April 2009, <http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/9447/error?cat=4>

purpose

The purpose that I open this weblog is to discuss about the issue related to publication and design. Very welcome to those who are interested with this aspect and shares same interest and concern about these issues. I would like to make this weblog more interesting:)