Understanding Ethos. The Importance of Incorporating Ethos into Document Design

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1 McLean 1 Understanding Ethos The Importance of Incorporating Ethos into Document Design To understand any form of document design, one must first be able to understand the audience that they are organizing the design towards. A strategic design lacking a proper target audience can never develop a sense of ethos between the reader and the designer if there are inconsistencies between the reader s tastes and the designer s intention. A professional-looking design may fail to build ethos with its readers if they find it irrelevant or insincere (383, Kostelnick), which is why ethos is not a concept to take lightly or a design aspect that can be overlooked. Overall, this essay will demonstrate the importance of properly constructed ethos through the review of tone, visual language and illustrations, page layout, and audience integration through research. This will lead to the realization that without a solid emphasis of effort placed into building a proper ethos with the reader any document, not matter how interesting or compelling will lose its addressees through improper document design and a lack of association with the target audience. While tone in itself is a separate design element from ethos and could receive a specific individual analysis, together tone and ethos strategies relate primarily to readers subjective responses to the visual language, its voice and credibility (14, Kostelnick). While tone can reveal your attitude towards your audience, it pairs especially well with ethos as your tone can establish a trusting relationship with your reader, as is the point of ethos. Your tone will establish your credibility with the reader as long as you match the written tone with the expectations of the

2 McLean 2 audience, as they will already be active members of the concepts that you are designing for them. Larry Beason explains in Strategies For Establishing an Effective Persona that ethos, or the persona that a speaker projects to an audience can be the most potent means of persuasion, often being more effective than either logical or emotional appeals. (326) This is because the emotional appeals can seem like an artificial means of persuasion and some audience members resent those who attempt emotional appeals when emotion should not enter a strategic design campaign. Furthermore, without establishing a base connection with the audience a logical appeal can fall upon deaf ears as the design has done nothing to entice the specific target audience. Therefore, the tone can be used to establish ethos between the audience and the designer, which cultivates the relationship and emphasises the designer s creditability by taking the reader s expected tone into the design. The visual language created by level design also has the ability to establish ethos between the reader and designer. Focusing on a specific strategy such as extra-level design by placing a heavy emphasis on pictures can establish ethos by showing perspectives and clarifying instructions or details for the reader. The visual language brings about perspective which emphasises a purpose in the design. However, a document that looks professional might still lack ethos (187, Kostelnick), which is why there must be a purpose behind the design that will relate to the readers expectation of the visual language. The design of the language must reflect the reader rather than the designer as it is their job to conform to what the reader wants; therefore, ethos is only achieved when the reader sees what they expect. Highlighted by Douglas Langfeild s Interface Design & Document Design paper, explaining how [t]ypically, the user interface and the documentation are designed by different departments, at different times, and

3 McLean 3 under different circumstances. That's unfortunate. When the product is released, there's no relation between the user interface and the documentation. Too often the poor user is left with competing mental models of what the product can do and how to use it (1). This is an example of an incorrect way of establishing ethos as there is a distance created between the designer and the audience through design separation. Therefore, the visual language design must also take ethos into account to establish a connection between what the designer wants to say and what the audience wants to see. The layout of a document is perceived before the content of the document itself, and this is why ethos must be established in the overall document design. In this case, ethos is the the straightforward arrangement, the clarity of the data points, the lack of visual noise, and the conventional typography (284, Kostelnick) within the document, all incorporated around the target audiences desires. As Erik Wilde describes in Document Design Matters, We strongly recommend the design of documents be informed by potential consumers and their cases, not by the producers of documents. (48) The reason being that the intention of the designer can be misunderstood by the time the layout reaches the audience and what may have seemed to conform to the original professional look, may seem overdone and a failed attempt at conforming to a market that the designer does not understand. By using the complete spectrum of possible consumers as input to the document design process for exchange models, it is possible to escape the implicit assumptions (49, Wilde), and create new design models with the aid of the developing and changing target audience s input. Consequently, ethos in document design is so important because it demonstrates the designer s ability to keep up to date with their audience and modify old stereotypical schemes, for new vibrant way of attracting attention.

4 McLean 4 While audience integration through research has been a general topic which incorporates itself around virtually every aspect of the document design, it should be explained that because creating ethos is completely about engaging the audience, they must be included for any design to succeed. Strategies For Establishing an Effective Persona written by Larry Beason explains how we must take the audience s voice into consideration to arrange, shape, and present ideas in a way that projects the image of a thoughtful and analytical person whose ideas deserve to be taken seriously. (327) Therefore, the ethos created in both the content and document design is to not only allow for the audience to understand that the designer knows them, and takes them seriously, but to mirror their own desires so they feel as though their voice is being represented within the document, in both design and content. Ethos can be established in all aspects of design and should be considered throughout the entire process to ensure that the reader s desired preconceptions are addressed. Through the review of tone, visual language and illustrations, page layout, and audience integration through research, this essay has argued that ethos is not only an important aspect to consider, but can be interwoven throughout nearly every aspect of the document s design. Without a proper ethos established between the audience and the designer there is no reason for the targeted addressees to assume that the designer has any expertise in the area of design that is being addressed. Therefore, to understand document design the designer must first understand and then conform to their audience, emphasizing that ethos is required in all successful aspects of designing visual language.

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6 McLean 6 Works Cited Kostelnick, Charles., and Roberts, David D. Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Commicators. Pearson Education Inc. (2011) Print. Beason, Larry. Strategies for Establishing an Effective Persona: an Analysis of Appeals to Ethos in Business Speeches Journal of Business Communication, (1991) pg Online. Langfield, Douglas. Interface Design & Document Design. Technical Communication (2002) pg Online. Wilde, Erik. Document Design Matters. Communications of the ACM. (2008) pg Online.