Three Fundamental Elements of Visual Rhetoric in Hypertext

Introduction The design of information on the printed page or on the computer screen must express the overall structure of that information in order to be understood by the reader. Various conventions of typography communicate the meta-structure of a block of text such as size of type, weight of font, use of indents, initial capitals (derived from illuminated capitals in the manuscript tradition), use of bold and italic variations, and use of color. Analogous conventions exist in information graphics for communicating quantitative information, visual narrative such as instructions, and location graphics such as maps. Hypertext adds a new element to visual communication by requiring the identification and traversal of links. This new element must either share in the established visual conventions or it must be conveyed through the creation a new visual language. This apparent polarity is not a simple either/or proposition. In practice, the design of each hypertext system must establish the appropriate mix of convention and innovation. There are three elements that should be communicated in any hypertext system. These three fundamental elements are: • link presence (which must include link extent), • link destination (which must include multiple destinations), • link mapping (which must display link and node relationships).