dbeach at klikmaker.com wrote: > This is my first submission to this mailing list. If it's not > appropriate for this list, I apologize in advance. > > http://www.klikmaker.com/pdf/211TestPage.pdf > > Let me apologize if what I am about to say offends anyone, but let me preface it to say that as I look at the page, it's a bit disheartening to see sophisticated tools being used to end up with a design with problems. I am not a publishing or design person; oddly enough, I'm a neurologist, who just happens to have an interest in design and how it works, in my case mostly in relationship to information transmission and education. There are a collection of books by Edward Tufte, the first entitled "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" which are in themselves excellent examples of design and printing, but show much more than what I am going to refer to here.
The problems go back to the page's purpose, in this case to attract a customer to the page, and then allow him/her to extract the needed information and use it. In the end, the necessary information is the names and descriptions of the items, and the catalog numbers. Everything else is arbitrary, including the white spaces in various areas, and should be used to help the eye home in on the necessary information and allow easy reading. Generally I see all the headers and descriptions, most of the pictures as reasonably appropriate for this. On the other hand, the horizontal red lines, and the various black lines, while perhaps (but maybe not) necessary, draw attention needlessly to them -- the brain is perceptually drawn to red, and there are parts of the brain that get quite excited with horizontal or vertical lines, especially in rows. Thus, it's harder to see the "real" information around or between. My advice would be to try out switching red lines to gray and thinner, trying to do away with the black lines altogether -- information arranged in rows and columns and tabulated forms its own structure even without the lines -- or if they're felt needed, thinner (fraction of a point) and gray. Perhaps something of a personal choice, maybe legibility, is the white typeface on red background for the catalog numbers. Especially when there is excess red, it's quite distracting visually, and one wonders if it's really necessary. What's wrong with dark red on white? Maybe bold black on white? What is the most legible in various kinds and intensities of illumination? The nice thing about DTP is that once you have a design layout, you can play with elements, colors, positioning and decide for yourself what works, what is more or less attractive, and get some consensus. Some of these changes I'm suggesting would lead to a simpler design that ends up being less work for you. Greg
