Model your message

Thought for the day

   Presentation is half the taste, cooks tell me. If the mind is prepared for deliciousness, the tongue need only confirm.
   The same may be said for presenting content: Model the message. The language, the look, the images, even the organisation, can be used to support or subvert your message. Support gets my vote.
   I ran across an excellent discussion of how it helps the reader to present web content in a simple form that the audience would expect for the type of content. So a shop would look different, work different and be different from a travel site or a car dealership. That was message one.

   Seeing is working.

   Message two was that our ocular system has to work at decoding images, colours, shapes, arrangements. If the design is complicated, making the eye move all over, assaulting the eye with disparate and dystopic images, the brain is exhausted and there isn't power left to absorb the message. One simply gets tired.
   It was odd, then, that the article was repeatedly interrupted with complicated, sometimes fuzzy and unfocused, bright and colourful images. In order to get to the end of it, I had to force myself past the exhausting visuals – it wasn't, in sum, a long article, but it seemed interminable. (The article remains anonymous. If you find this writer's work, you'll probably like it, as do I, and one quibble isn't worth setting low expectations.)

   Doing is showing.

   So now I stop.

Random shopper at Castro Farmers Market sporting her Vincie, context works. Photo by Vincie.