Book Design

In class, we discussed the importance that Hayles gave to materiality/design, not only in the text of her book, but also in its visual design. For their book, First Person, Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan also hired someone, Michael Crumpton, whose sole job was to design the visual aspects of their book. A few other people have discussed the materiality of First Person; here are my thoughts:

When I compare Crumpton's design for First Person to Anne Burdick's design for Writing Machines, Burdick comes out ahead, I think. Both designs incorporate screenshots into the body of the text, which is certainly helpful. But apart from that shared feature, the two books use different design elements. We've already discussed Burdick's design some-- the magnified text, the "hyperlinks," the screenshots and actual text incorporated into the text. Crumpton's two most unique and visible design features are the top/bottom split text and the brief outline at the top of the page that shows which authors and responses are in the current chapter, and which one you're presently reading.

The split text seems like an idea with good intentions but not much useful effect. I didn't get any more out of the responses by having them share a page with the text they were critiquing than I would have if they had been ordered one after the other, because the essays didn't usually talk about the same points on the same page. The simultaneity wasn't real.

The outline at the top of the page was mildly helpful in keeping track of where in the chapter I was, I guess. But it still reminded me of the "hyperlinks" in Hayles' book that didn't actually connect to anything-- they both seemed like computer features that the designers were trying to adapt to books (and they did adapt them, but ultimately, they weren't all that helpful.)

Although some people found Burdick's magnification of certain passages of Hayles' text to be ham-fisted, I felt that that at least aided my understanding of the text, whereas Crumpton's design didn't really help-- it just distracted/disoriented (here I'm thinking of the split text) without achieving anything with that disorientation.