Design and Visuals

When incorporating visuals into a document, it is important to consider audience perception. For instance, Petroski recommends that we consider font, font style, and text size as design elements. How will the reader interpret an italicized word? These are the questions we must ask ourselves as we work on our own technical documents. At the same time, a document must remain visually appealing to an audience. It is about finding balance. Meanwhile, Kostelnick gives us a similar yet slightly diffferent view. He says that text design is in fact rhetorically active, meaning that slight variations in text, bulleting, headings, etc. can effect a reader's perception of our work!