The Visual Effect: A Literature Review of Visual Design Principles as They Apply to Academic Library Websites

Abstract

This paper reviews the concept of visual design as it applies to academic library webpages. There exist multiple unsettled aspects of visual design on library websites, prompting a need to critically examine and update current design practices. This paper presents aspects of layout, graphics, and navigation where no consensus for an effective design allowing students to interact with a library website has been achieved among librarians. It suggests areas of research whose investigation would strengthen the design of academic library webpages, and make them both more usable and more esthetically pleasing to a student population.

Keywords:

• Visual design
• library webpages

Notes

1 There exist related bodies of literature focusing on visual design for non-student audiences. While these bodies are notable, they fall outside the scope of this article. With its focus on academic libraries, this article focuses on a student user population.

2 The terms graphic design, graphic user interface (GUI) design, Web design, and user experience design all exist as well, and are to some extent fluid in their relations to visual design. Chapman (2018) distinguishes visual design from the others by describing it as an overarching practice that combines the worlds of graphic design (which, echoing Cezzar’s (2017) definition, she describes as having its roots in print media), and the worlds of Web, user interface, and user experience design.  Visual design is, accordingly, a broad concept that gets scaled into increasingly granular conceptualizations.

3 The presence of the word “grammar” in Newell’s (2004) term “visual grammar,” as well as his focus on the “vocabulary” of images implies a semiotic, language-based understanding of an image. While it enjoys a strong degree of acceptance among many scholars, this understanding of image interpretation has been the subject of criticism as well. For example, both W. J. T. Mitchell (1994) and Baetens and Surdiacourt (2011) point out that images have their own modalities through which they should be understood and interpreted, separate from spoken or written language that assigns terms to objects and themes as a process through which meaning may be communicated. While this criticism certainly has merit, it does not typically reflect the views of visual literacy scholars such as Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), who have largely embraced the dual modality pairing of images and language. This pairing becomes important in designing the navigational elements of a library website.

4 Color is characterized by hue, saturation, and luminance – hue being a color’s pigment, saturation being the strength and intensity of the color, and luminance being the brightness of light in a color.

5 ProQuest’s AquaBrowser (https://www.proquest.com/products-services/AquaBrowser.html).