Reflections

Blogs are not all about entertainment and social fun; blogs can in fact be educational and informative. Indeed, that was what I had set my mind to when creating Sunshine in a Jar – to present my understanding on the subject of Document Design and Publication (DDP) as academically and as comprehensible as possible.

Even as presenting the words of facts through the issues discussed in this blog, I managed to apply techniques learnt from the subject DDP to increase the readability of my blog. For example: I opted for a white layout instead of a black one and segregated information into shorter and more concise paragraphs to enhance readability. According to Kress and Van Leeuwen (1998, p.187), visuals fulfill a 'prosodic' role, in which Walsh (2006, p.29) also states that visuals are able to evoke responses of different levels, particularly at affective, aesthetic and imaginative levels. Thus, I integrated visual and texts in my discussion to make the issue more appealing to readers as well as presented hyperlinks when necessary as a form of multimodality.

In all, publishing a serious weblog for assignment purposes is quite a challenging task. Nevertheless, it has allowed me to expand my ability of researching and of applying the concepts and theories learnt in discussing issues pertaining to the media, design and publication industry.

Reference:

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 1998, ‘Chapter 7: Front pages: (the critical) analysis of newspaper layout’, in Bell, A & Garret, P (eds) 1998, Approaches to media discourse, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 186-219.

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.