MEDIA AND INFORMATION LITERACY (MIL)

TEXT INFORMATION AND MEDIA (Part 1 )

Defenition, Characteristics, Format and Types, Text as Visual, Selection Criteria,
Design Principle and Elements

What is TEXT ?

 is a simple and flexible format of presenting information or conveying ideas whether

hand-written, printed or displayed on-screen.
 any “human-readable sequence of characters” that can form intelligible words.

TYPES OF TEXT AND COMMON FILE FORMATS

TYPES OF TEXT DESCRIPTION

HYPERTEXT Serve to link different electronic
documents and enable users to jump from
one to other in a nonlinear way
PLAINTEXT or Fixed sized characters having essentially
the same type of appearance
UNFORMATTED TEXT
FORMATTED TEXT Appearance can be changed using font
parameters (bold, underline, italic, font
size, font color, etc.)

What is a TYPEFACE ?
 also called font, font type, or type
 refers to the representation or style of a text in the digital format
 usually comprised of alphabets, numbers, punctuation marks, symbols, and
other special characters
TYPES OF TYPEFACES
SANS SERIF
 brings a clean or minimalist look to the text
 used for clear and direct meaning of text such as road signage, building directory or
nutrition facts in food packages
 give a modern look and is used primarily in webpage design
 Ex: Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, Verdana, Calibri

SLAB SERIF
 carries a solid or heavy look to text
 can be used for large advertising sign on billboards
Ex: Rockwell, Playbill

SCRIPT
 draws much attention to itself because of its brush-like strokes
 must be used sparingly and not to be used in large body text
 usually used in wedding invitation cards or other formal events
 Ex: Eduardian, Vladimir, Kunstler

DECORATIVE
 Caters to a wild variety of emotions (susch as celebrations, fear, horror, etc.)
or themes (such as cowboys, circus, holidays, summer, kiddie, etc.)
 Ex: Chiller, joker man, curlz MT
 COMMON FILE FORMATS DESCRIPTION
TEXT (text)  Unformatted text document by an editor as
notepad on windows platform
DOC (document)  A native format for storing documents created by
MS word package
 Contain a rich set of formatting capabilities
RTF (Rich Text Format)  cross platform document exchange; default format
for Mac OS X’s default editor TextEdit
PDF (Portable Document Format)  developed by Adobe systems for cross platform
exchange of documents, supports image and
graphics
PS (PostScript)  A page descriptions language used mainly for
desktop publishing

DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND ELEMENTS

1. EMPHASIS
 Importance or value given to a part of a text-based content
Ex:

2.APPROPRIATENESS

 how fitting or suitable the text is used for a specific audience, purpose or event

3.PROXIMITY
 How near or how far the text elements from each other
 When two things are closely related, bring them close together

4. ALIGNMENT

 How the text is positioned in the page

 left, center, right, or justified

5. ORGANIZATION

 Conscious effort to organize the different text elements in a page

 Ensures that while some text elements are separated from each other,
they are still somehow connected with the rest of the elements in the
page

6. REPETITION

 Consistency of elements
  Unity of the entire design
 Repeating some typefaces within the page

7. CONTRAST

 Creates visual interest

 two elements are different from each other