Describing and critiquing multimodal documents

Abstract

This paper outlines a practical model for linguistic and typographical document description that enables the constructive critiquing of documents. By looking at document development as a process of negotiating communication goals and practical constraints, we can understand what compromises have been made in arriving at the final outcome, and why. We can also understand how a document's final appearance serves, or fails to serve, its communicative goals. We demonstrate our approach through an analysis of a page from a bird book, the Observer's Book of Birds (1972), showing how only some of the final design decisions appear motivated. Moving on to a consideration of genres and how they shift over time, we go on to present a more recent book, the Collins Wild Guide (1996), arguing for an increase over time in the tendency to differentiate elements of meaning using typography and layout. Next, we show the process of genre shift at work over a much shorter time scale, using as an example the developmentofa letter design by an information design company. We argue that more recent designs tend to use typography and layout to reflect more closely underlying levels of rhetorical and content structure. We suggest that our model provides a basis for describing and understanding how documents ofall kinds reach their final appearance, and for comparing documents across genres and times.