Design Principles

The topic of our last reading was designing documents. For the most part, I thought the information provided in the chapter was helpful. It was nice to be introduced to all the different design principles. Knowing how design aspects such as proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast all work together to make or break a successful technical document will be valuable knowledge to have now and into the future. In my opinion, however, I think the depth of analysis into some of the specifics of each design principle was a bit silly. For example, you are told things such as where exactly a page number should go depending on whether the document is one-sided or two, the proper size difference between the typefaces of the heading and body of a document, and the correct amount of space that should be between two lines of text. To be honest, I think using a bit of common sense will suffice to judge whether a document looks respectable or ridiculous. But, to be fair, I guess I shouldn't blame the creators of a book on technical writing for being comprehensive.