Printed books have a certain look, an underlying graphic design that helps to promote consistency and clarity. It's important to make sure your multimedia titles adhere to a consistent internal design—topic screens look alike, typefaces are consistent, and multimedia elements such as audio, graphics, and animation should integrate cleanly into the overall feel of the title.
Given the large and varied number of text, audio, and graphic resources that could come together in your title, take the time to identify some basic design standards at the beginning of the development process.
You should decide on an overall concept or metaphor for your title. For example, in the Viewer's sample USA Tour, since the basis of the title is information about the United States, the basic metaphor was a map—other visuals in the title build on and reinforce that basic metaphor as they provide information and guidance.
As you divide the information in your title into separate topics or screens, you should strive to ensure they maintain a consistent style in terms of written voice, content, and breadth of information.
For example, decide whether you intend to require the user to scroll through the information in a topic, or whether instead you'll limit topics to only the amount of information that can appear in a standard window. This decision affects the design of your title—shorter topics can require a greater number of browse sequences or cross-topic jumps (possibly not a good idea with CD-ROM as this increases the number of times the software has to access the optical disk).
The fonts you choose for your text play an important part in ensuring the readability and aesthetic qualities of a title. Some typefaces are easier to read online than others (for example, some research indicates Sans Serif fonts work better online than Serif fonts). Even though Windows with Multimedia provides flexibility in your choice of fonts, font size, and font colors, inconsistency and poor design in the use of these typefaces can detract from the information content of your title.
Audio samples can substantially enhance the usefulness of a multimedia title. You must make sure, however, that any audio used is easy to understand, not too loud or too soft, and of consistent quality with other sound samples used.
Various factors affect audio samples: the number of bits used to store the sample (typically 8 bit or 16 bit), the quality of the equipment used to obtain the sample, and the sampling rate at which the original sound was digitized (11.025 kHz, 22.05 kHz, or 44.1 kHz). The higher the sampling rate, the better the quality. Of course, the better the quality, typically the more disk space required for storage.
If you decide to include audio with your title, make sure you take the time to understand the associated issues and establish some guidelines.
Images and animation add tremendous value to any title. The use of graphics and animation can help clarify relatively obscure texts. Good graphics communicate efficiently. If you choose to use graphics with your title, make sure to include their usage into your design standards.
Establish guidelines for all aspects of how your title will display graphics: their placement, whether to use borders, number of colors, size of the graphics, and many other factors.
Establishing a quality design standard before development takes some time, but adherence to professionally developed standards not only makes your title look better, it helps make it easier to use. And easier to market as well.