Applying Design Techniques

Open the file rawtext.txt in Microsoft Word.

Design an Exercise Handout.

page layout exercise although most of us think of "reading" as a left to right, top to bottom of the page experience, people typically read in a much more complicated fashion. they scan pages, finding important elements to focus on and relegating other elements to lesser status, sometimes not even bothering to read some elements at all. this is true of readers of nearly any ability, from novice to expert. in addition to inbuilt mechanisms for attention focus, readers have spent enormous amounts of time learning how to "read" pages and screens. (this learning is primarily experience based, so in many cases we're not even aware of what we're doing or why. but that doesn't lessen its effect on how people process pages and screens to build understanding.) for this exercise, i'd like you to form teams to work on a project that will test your skills at applying the page/screen structuring principles we've discussed in our workshop. you'll take a single page of relatively unstructured text (that is, the text you're reading right now) and use a variety of features in microsoft word to structure the page. you can make minor edits to the text (changes, deletions, additions), but in general i'd like you to use page/screen layout features inherent in word: paragraphing, font family, size, and style changes; line spacing and margin changes; word art (use judicioiusly); bullets and numbered lists; colors; borders and shading; tables (turn off the borders to gain page grids), etc. you can also reorder sections of this document as necessary. we'll spend approximately twenty minutes on the structuring work, then share our designs with each other and discuss what principles (and techniques) we applied and why.