Sign in or register
for additional privileges

Digital Writing Portfolio

Molloy Digital Writing 2014

Stephanie Ciurleo, Author

You appear to be using an older verion of Internet Explorer. For the best experience please upgrade your IE version or switch to a another web browser.

Rhetorical Design

     Just like the other concepts discussed in this project, Rhetorical design is all about the design choices that you make when creating a composition. Just like out last concept, Multimodal composition, rhetorical design can be broken down into a few elements. The elements are as follows;
1. Organization
2. Constrast
3. Emphasis
4. Alignment
5. Proximity
     Organization is just what you think it is. The order in which you put things into your design have a huge impact on whether or not your design and your composition will be understood. Organization also speaks to how you relate text and media within a composition.
     Contrast is all about the colors that you use throughout a composition. Contrast can also be achieved by using different sized texts. Examples of contrast can be found in my Manifesto prezi, on the very first prezi page. There you will find the use of different fonts, font sizes and colors throughout the prezi. Red and black font are also used to create contrast. Contrast is important because it makes a composition visually interesting and it catches the eye.
     Next comes emphasis. Emphasis is when you use other elements such as contrast to place value on certain aspects of your project. Say you wrote out a blurb in size 12 black ink. You want to emphasis what that blurb is all about. To do this you would type out your title in size 20 font, in maybe red ink. The enlargement and the brightness of the color stresses the point being made. It will automatically be deemed of importance by the reader because you have emphasized it.
     Alignment is the next truly important element of rhetorical design. Alignment is all about how text and media look on a page. For example, on this page I decided to align all of the media in a straight line down, on the left side of the page, and the text to the right. This is a part of this pages rhetorical design.
     Lastly, we come to proximity. This is how close together each piece of media or text is on a page. I came into this problem when I was first entering prezi onto this page. The images int he sidebar were overlapping onto the prezi, This was an issue of proximity. It made the page look sloppy. That is not the impression that you wan to put out. How you space all of the elements on a page is extremely important to the design of a page and and entire project as a whole.

     
Comment on this page
 

Discussion of "Rhetorical Design"

Add your voice to this discussion.

Checking your signed in status ...

Previous page on path The Concepts of Digital Writing, page 3 of 3 Path end, return home