In comparing and contrasting the first issue of SMH in
1831 and the latest electronic form of SMH on ipad and laptop. It is obvious to
see that the traditional form of print media rely heavily on the text
arrangement like typeface, font size, bold
and italics to catch readers’ attention about what’s important and what’s
not. Headlines and key words are usually aligned to the centre. Letterpress can
only bold and capitalize all the letters (THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD) to draw
readers attention to the newspaper and headline from the packed text below. Information
is purely written with no graphics or images as supporting evidence while all
font colours are simply black.
With the emergence of digital technologies, SMH has
eventually developed their online news site; Digital media no longer publish
news with a limited range of industry standard tools (old, formal and dull letterpress),
coding and mark up languages have become crucial in production (enabling freer
layout and format). These digital technologies enhance a higher standard of
production, allowing a numerous of fonts, freer grid systems and visual hierarchies
with higher complexity.
News also became a lot
more visually appealing and interesting as colours and images were incorporated
into establishing hierarchy and consistency.
With reference to the second and third image, digital
media has used a conceptual approach to analyse the content of the news: the images on the newspaper are competing
against each other to grab readers’ attention with different sizes and colours
of pictures and texts. Cartoons and funny pictures are incorporated into the
text as a promotional and advertising affect to arouse viewers’ attention.
This shows how technology has changed the traditional
constrained letterpress to a far more engaging and eye catching digital media
where information are expressed typographically as
well as the clearly articulated visual hierarchy.
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