Identifying Communication Design
Effective
The image above is an example of effective communication design. It is a screenshot of the front page of a website that sells dancewear. It is intended for anyone looking to buy the proper attire and accessories for dance, sports, gymnastics, or general exercise, and is located at us.blochworld.com. The goal of the front page is to give consumers an idea of what the brand looks like, and to convince them to purchase attire of the Bloch brand. The design is effective because the majority of the page is taken up by a single, high-quality image, and the image contains a single dancer. The focus of the page becomes the dancer, who is wearing a simple ballet outfit in a beautiful ballet posture. The text to the left of the dancer is concise, stating only what is being sold, a few words advertising quality, and a link to the collection. At the top of the page, the text is streamlined as well, with the BLOCH logo standing out and a few links underneath, separating the different collections of products that they sell. The entire page is made up of neutral colors (black, white, tans), which works together with the overall message that the design presents — simple and classic. The placement of the colors (black in the background) also happen to evoke a theatrical setting, and the neutral colors happen to be colors commonly used in dance attire.
Ineffective
The image above is an example of ineffective communication design. It is the front page of a website that also sells dancewear, but of various brands this time. It is intended for people looking to buy attire and accessories for dance, gymnastics, or general activewear, and is located at discountdance.com. The goal of the design is to convince people to purchase dance attire at Discount Dance Supply, rather than at other sources that sell dancewear, presumably by emphasizing that Discount Dance Supply has the widest selection of dancewear and has the best deals. The layout of the website can be described as busy, with lots of text and categories at the top, and various advertisements at the bottom. However, the message gets kind of lost with this amount of content. For example, the categories at the top take up two whole lines, but they don’t seem to have a clear organization (types of attire mixed with specific sports and brands). The images on the page are busy as well, with many different advertisements for random, separate groups, in different sizes. When you first arrive at the front page, the image to the right showing a dancer is a good advertisement for the collection, but it is overshadowed with so much content around it that distracts from the advertisement, and in addition, the image is also cut off at the bottom unless you scroll down. With the general amount of content on the page, some things on the page inevitably get overlooked, and it can be hard at first to find what you are looking for.
