Remediation and the visual evolution of design

This study is an interdisciplinary work, bringing together the areas of document design and journalism, aimed at informing the field of technical communication. By defining and examining how document design has been treated by technical communication textbooks and by breaking it down into its structural, navigation, and graphic elements, this study highlights the role visual communication plays in usability.;Treating the news as a form of technical communication, this study analyzes the visual dimensions of news communication by tracing the interaction of its formal design qualities in print, television, and the web. Extensive archival research includes examination of 340 front pages of six major U.S. newspapers, sixty episodes of seven network and cable television news shows, and fifteen news web site home pages. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's theory of "remediation" is used as a framework for a longitudinal study of the media. The design trends that emerge from this study demonstrate that each medium not only adapts the basic structural, navigation, and graphic elements of technical document design, but also influences the visual rhetoric of the other media.;The implications for technical document design include: (1) Using the modular structure that the news media favors in order to enhance the visual relationship between text and graphic elements; (2) Providing more "windows of entry" for users to ease non-linear approaches to documentation, and using hypertext-like navigation design elements to help users locate related information; (3) Including graphic elements to aid users who scan for information. Technical communicators are urged to create documentation that is both user-friendly and visually compelling by taking into account the how remediation operates in the visual progression of media and how users' experiences and expectations are shaped by this progression.