Harrower's Rules Of Thumb Analysis
The newspaper chosen for this assignment is New Straits Times. The three Harrower’s “Rules of Thumb” guidelines that will be discussed in this assessment are headlines, layout and design as well as photos.
1. Headlines
Headline is the basic element in designing a newspaper and plays a very significant role because the first thing readers will see on the newspaper is the headline (Paul, 2014). Without a good headline, even the best stories become useless because most people will only read the stories if the headline catches their attention.
According to Harrower (2012), every story must have a headline and the size decreases as it moves down the page. A good example can be seen on page 6. Meanwhile, the arrangement of headlines shown on page 3 were in contrast to Harrower’s guideline. The second story gets the largest headline while the top story has a midsize headline. This is a poor design because the second story with large and bold headline tend to overshadow the story placed at the top page. As we all know, readers skim through the pages and never read everything on the newspaper page. On this particular page, readers will focus on the story with largest …show more content…
Harrower (2012) stressed that aside from ensuring all four edges of the story needs to be align with each other, the shapes of text blocks often appear to be a challenge as journalist tries to fit their stories on a page. Generally, this newspaper practises Harrower’s rule as most of its stories are in rectangle shape except for page 62 and 63 as both text block and the overall story shape are in odd shape. Wheildon (1986) revealed that the basic reading eye movement is from the top left to the bottom right of the page. The messy and bad text arrangement on these pages not only causes confusion to readers but also difficulty in reading. Hence, these two pages have the worst layout and design in this
1. Headlines
Headline is the basic element in designing a newspaper and plays a very significant role because the first thing readers will see on the newspaper is the headline (Paul, 2014). Without a good headline, even the best stories become useless because most people will only read the stories if the headline catches their attention.
According to Harrower (2012), every story must have a headline and the size decreases as it moves down the page. A good example can be seen on page 6. Meanwhile, the arrangement of headlines shown on page 3 were in contrast to Harrower’s guideline. The second story gets the largest headline while the top story has a midsize headline. This is a poor design because the second story with large and bold headline tend to overshadow the story placed at the top page. As we all know, readers skim through the pages and never read everything on the newspaper page. On this particular page, readers will focus on the story with largest …show more content…
Harrower (2012) stressed that aside from ensuring all four edges of the story needs to be align with each other, the shapes of text blocks often appear to be a challenge as journalist tries to fit their stories on a page. Generally, this newspaper practises Harrower’s rule as most of its stories are in rectangle shape except for page 62 and 63 as both text block and the overall story shape are in odd shape. Wheildon (1986) revealed that the basic reading eye movement is from the top left to the bottom right of the page. The messy and bad text arrangement on these pages not only causes confusion to readers but also difficulty in reading. Hence, these two pages have the worst layout and design in this