Print VS Screen Document Design

Screen document design

Print document design

Document design today plays a very important role in terms of readership. Printed documents today are becoming less and less popular as screen documents are the ones taking over the industry. The document design of both the print and screen documents are more or less the same as readers read from left to right, top to bottom (Kress & Van Leuwen, 1998). 

There are three main differences between both the documents that will be discussed in the post which are the ease of reading, the reading content and the writing structures. Firstly, the comparison of both the documents for the ease of reading is that printed documents are much harder to read as there are much more words on documents and they also tend to be more dull compared to screen documents which are usually simple, less wordy and more appealing to readers. Next, the content of the document for printed documents are so much more in-depth as they talk from one end to another unlike screen documents which only highlights main points without much elaboration. The writing structure for printed documents would be more formal in terms of layout and also language. On the other hand, screen documents tend to be less formal compared to printed ones.

Both of these document designs have their individual advantages and disadvantages. For instance, for a presentation it is better to use a screen document design rather than a printed one as it is too lengthy but for a in-depth study or research it is always better to use a printed document as it is well explained and elaborated.

References

Kress, G & Leeuwen, V 1998, "Front Pages: (the critical) analysis of newspaper Layout , in , Approaches to Media Discourse , eds A Bell, P Garrett, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 184-221.