Facebook Facelift

Millions of people use Facebook, one of the increasingly popular social networking site, and were satisfied with it. Then in mid-2008, they started changing its design, creating massive disapproval and even had protest Facebook groups petitioning for it to be revert to its old look. Its makeover created headlines around and grew worse when the option of changing back to the old feature was removed and the makeover was there to stay. The users were unhappy about the way the design look and how the features had all change but most people were more furious over the fact that the social networking site did not review the opinions of its users before making changes (Ramadge 2008).

However, changes will still be made and users of Facebook will just have to accept it as Liedtke (2008) reported. It might take a while for it to get used to but sooner or later, it will be just as if it didn't change. According to Zuckerberg (Liedtke 2008), 30 million out of the 40 million who checked out the new look accepted the change without even using the option to revert back to its old look. Therefore, time is all it needs for changes to be accepted. It cannot be that bad if its old design was liked, it would only be a matter of time before the new one sinks in as well.

References:

Liedtke, M 2008, Facebook gets another facelift, viewed 12 November 2008, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26639923/

Ramadge, A 2008, Facebook protest group hits a million users, viewed 12 November 2008, http://www.news.com.au/story/0,,24365075-2,00.html

Print vs Online: The Deal About Design

Online media can be noted to be of a higher advantage when it comes to the debate of which is the better publication. Of course, each has its own advantages (and disadvantages) but both practises the principle of multimodality.

Print material can have text accompanied with images - the text can vary in font and arrangement, and the image can be designed or even just a simple photograph. Web-based media, on the other hand, can incorporate moving images, sound, text - all in various forms. According to Walsh (2006), readers of the content on the Internet are more 'involved' and can choose their reading pathways with the different hyperlinks presented whereas the multimodality of print based is usually linear in its reading pathway.

Take the National Geographic in its print and online form as an example:

The Cover of the National Geographic Magazine

[Source:http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/]

Print design is much simpler with few images (or in this case, one image) and play with typography. Readers can read the information quite easily.

The National Geographic Website

[Source: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/]

Here there are several ways for the reader to engage with the information on site, not to mention the additional flash images for advertisement and links to topics in the website.

References:

Walsh, M 2006, The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-35.