Questions for Discussion in Computer Class

1. How important is colour as a design factor? To what extent does colour coordination effect the reading or viewing of a text? An emotional impact on the response of readers or viewers? Relation between colour background and foreground elements (and highlights)?

Colours play quite dissimilar roles and differ by the areas and shapes they occupy. It can befriend a viewer or can alienate him/her because many colours and tints do possess certain implications that are more or less the same for all viewers. If the colour coordination effect is fine, it is good for the viewer’s eyesight. Otherwise it will hurt the viewer. Then the viewer will feel not comfortable to look at the design and may get frustrated after a period of time. There must be a high enough level of contrast between the text and background so that legibility can be achieved. For example, black text on white background is the most legible.  But of course, there's a continuum of other colour pairs that are contrasting enough to not sacrifice legibility. Text colour needs support from the background, as a dark-coloured text is very likely to be taken simply for black.  If, however, background and text colours back up each other, their true nature is communicated in a much more eloquent fashion.  With this scheme, link colours can be used to somehow zest the otherwise monotonous colour landscape. 

2. How important are lettering styles-the use of fonts, size of letters, letter spacings/lines, capitals, etc.?

In order to distinguish title from text, we may precede body text with the heading and make the latter bigger in size and more prominent. We can also make it unusual. We can make people wonder where's the title and why it's so designed. For headings and logos we may employ decorative or stylized typefaces, while body text, to avoid distracting the reader, should be limited to conventional serif and sans serif fonts such as Times or Helvetica. An incredible creative potential lies in varying the two spacing parameters of a font, the distances between letters and between lines.  Increasing natural intraword spaces makes the text sound more slow, solemn, even heavenly (in a novel I've read, this type of emphasis was used to represent the speech of angels).  This trick may be used to amplify the effect of both all-uppercase and all-lowercase styles, but it doesn't go together well with mixed case. For multiline text, an analog of increased intraword space is the big interline space---this, too, makes the text sound more profound and persuasive.  But setting zero or even negative interline space produces a tight bunch of a heading and forces it to vibrate much more intensively. 

3. Going beyond the particular purposes of a communication (e.g. information, persuasion/commercial or even entertainment): do you think it is generally more important to emphasise simplicity and functionality or attractive appearance (i.e. form or function) … to what extent is a younger generation more “visual’ than their parents?

I think it is generally more important to emphasize simplicity and function rather than attractive appearance. Today people who design prefer simple geometric textures.  Therefore it's not surprising that the simplest one is most widely used. Besides the obvious general trend towards geometric simplicity in modern design, this can be in part attributed to the wider color repertoire of electronic media. However, sometimes, plain color just isn't enough. Today’s youth are more visual than their parents. They are more sensitive to colors and may have a better perspective with a wide arrange of colors. Not like their parents, they are more likely to use bright colors when design a page and a bright-colored page may be more likely to appeal them than simple ones.