The New Era of Grids and Visual Heirarchies

New technologies are always developing, allower society to indulge in grerater convenience. Especially with digital technologies, it has allowed a wider variety in options for designing grids and visual heirarchies.

This is particularly evident in people reading the newspaper now a days. Some still choose to buy the physical printed paper, whereas some enjoy reading it online as a terms of convenience. The grids and visual heirarchies of these two forms are also quite different.

The traditional printed newspaper utilises many columns in the text, with smaller serif fonts. It has rather short line lengths and small leading. The overall page uses just black and white text except for the colour in images. These traditional newspapers appear to be visually less attractive compared to newspaper that are supplied online.

Newpapers online although provide the same content, but they are visually presented differently. They use slightly larger sans serif fonts, which the text appears in less columns, where other links and ads are placed within. Column width and leading are also a lot larger compared to traditional printed newspaper. Visually, the online news is a lot more colourful, which may attract the audience to read the news supplied online rather than the printed ones.

These attributes all have an effect upon how the audience chooses to read the news, online or physically with the traditional papers. On screen technology has clearly made a large impact upon these traditional conventions of the news, generating these largely contrasted grids and visual heirarchies of newspaper.