Multimodal design: Media structures, media principles and users’ meaning-making in printed and digital media

Modern media messages are visually fragmented since they are built up of various visual elements and units (Holsanova & Nord, 2010). This tendency has also been described as atomization of news texts (Knox, 2007) or as modularization of the text design (Bucher, 2000). Media messages are also multimodal in the sense that they contain delimited parts of text (articles, headlines, briefs, lists of items, fact boxes), static and dynamic pictures and graphics (photos, drawings, diagrams, graphs, maps, films, video clips, animations, typographic and layout elements) and auditive parts (speech files, sound, music, etc.). Moreover, media messages are multisequential since they offer various entry points and reading paths. Thus, there is no obvious linear order in which these messages should be perceived. All these characteristics influence the reception of media messages. The following questions arise: How does the reader choose entry points and reading paths, and navigate in the media? How does the reader create coherence in the fragmented message? How does the reader integrate information coming from different sources (text, photos, graphs, etc.) in the process of meaning-making?
In our contribution, we will summarize relevant media design principles coming from various design disciplines (information design, document design, multimedia design, web design) but also theoretical and applied works on media structures coming from media discourse, social semiotics, rhetoric, literary science and discourse analysis (section 2). A special focus will be on cognitive principles underlying media design, promoting interaction, integration and understanding of the message. Further, we connect production and reception perspectives and discuss the effect of media design principles on readers’ behaviour and users’ meaning-making (section 3). In particular, we show how the spatial proximity principle, the signalling principle and the dual scripting principle can support the reader, attract the reader’s attention, provide attentional guidance throughout the message, and facilitate information processing and semantic integration of the complex material. Finally, in section 4, we will discuss the relations between media structures, media design principles and different ways of reading.