This is a branch of an earlier mentioned issue of choosing images that as clear as possible and can not interpreted as anything else. Using icons can be tricky in itself, but there is not reason to "reinvent the wheel" when choosing an icon to represent something. It might be more visually appealing or a clever, but it could perceive as something else. For example, a icon of a letter on a screen or the "@" symbol has been universally acknowledged as two icons that indicate email. But if you try to create another icon to represent email, then the audience might be looking for the universally acknowledged icon and miss the one that is new to them. Using icons that everyone knows and acknowledges ensures that your website is easily navigable.

Using headings and subheading is something I never considered until I took a class taught by Dr. Gu. He encourages all students use subheadings when writing long memos or papers. As a producer of text, it was very helpful to write under subheadings to keep the information relevant to the subheading. Now I seek out subheadings because they make things easier to read especially longer articles.

I think that bold sentences can be a good way to distinguish important information like in this article by the Huffington Post. Because it's a top 10 tips list, the actual tips are in bold while the secondary information explaining the information is normal face. So while we should use bold specifically sparingly, I would argue that it is a great way to identify the pertinent information in a wordy article.

This video from graphic designer Karen Kavett really helped me understand some of the basic typography vocabulary and principles.

This is so true nowadays. A lot of different websites from Twitter to dating apps now limit the amount of characters because people just don't read continuous text anymore. Although it was contested, I think that unless people are looking for information specifically, we mostly do "skim" on the internet, especially on social media which has become a source of news for many American adults.

This seems a little like common sense. If there is 100 bunnies and one of them is black, that bunny will attract the eye. If you have something that you want people to see on your website, create visual contrast. The eye will be drawn to it naturally.

Being clear and concise about what the designer in trying to say and what the purpose of the website is will help with this. When I see something like this on a website, it makes me feel as if the content creator doesn't know what exactly is important to them to tell me. Therefore, I don't know what I should take away from that content. The pertinent information be the biggest and eye catching and easily found, and all relevant but not as important information should be relatively smaller, but not hidden.

This is one of the most helpful tips that I've learned in my studies of how to design. The brain wants to make sense of the things that you see; it wants to be able to flow through a webpage with ease. Keeping this in mind can allow a more effective website that is easy to navigate. Having a clutter website that has lots of unorganized information can be really overwhelming to the user. Like a well written paper, a website has to make sense throughout and flow with ease through different aspects.

I find this to be very helpful tip. Oftentimes, I will look at something that I know very well to be a particular thing, but when I ask someone to look at, it's interpreted as something different. For example, my elementary school mascot was a rocket. I never thought to be or look like anything other than a rocket. But when I returned to the school as a teenager with someone who never went to my elementary school, they saw it as something more phallic.

Designers have to be clear to the point of exhaustion, especially with visual media. Fonts, pictures, and logos can be interpreted into things that might prove inappropriate to your website. Make sure that there is no contest to things on your webpage.

"The following guidelines are intended to assist Web designers, authors, and editors in their efforts to creat Web pages that effectively reveal--rather than obscure or confuse--the information they are trying to present."

In reading this article and being in this class and Digital Writing and Publishing, I realize, now more than ever, that understanding rhetoric is vital in creating anything on the Web. With such grand audience, designers have to have so sort of background in effectively designing and writing in order to provide an effective website for anyone who might happen upon it. This sentence is the definition of a rhetorical discourse. This proves that studying rhetoric can prove useful in lots of fields, contrary to belief.