Document design is an element of writing that I tend to really enjoy. It gives me great satisfaction to make sure that all my text looks nice and professional, editing typefaces, size, color, spacing, etc. According to both “Beyond Black on White: Document Design and Formatting in the Writing Classroom” by Michael J. Klein and Kristi L. Shackelford as well as “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing” by Melanie Gagich, these elements are extremely important. Klein and Shackelford use examples to showcase these ideas and how these design elements impact your writing.
I personally think that I am relatively skilled at document design and knowing how to format certain texts on a page because I like the way it looks when it’s done. I design a midterm paper differently than my resume, and each document utilizes different fonts, colors, spacing, etc. These are key in any kind of document, and they need to be catered to your audience depending on what you’re writing, which is something that Gagich explains. As well as this, Gagich also describes how not only the audience is important, but also the message, the author, the genre, and the medium. All of these components work together and need to be considered when creating any document. This makes sense to me, as the way you design one thing to teach high schoolers a concept is going to be drastically different than the way you design something to teach kindergarteners a different concept. These are things I always have in the back of my mind when designing something.
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