Document Analysis Example
The Fashion Transparency Index (“Fashion,” 2020) presents a good deal of information to the reader. Unfortunately, the look and feel of the presentation are scattered, while the color scheme fails to attract and arrest the reader’s attention.
Defining Audience, Purpose, and Context
The audience of the document—the website, more properly—is anyone who is interested in developments within the world of high fashion. The purpose is to provide up-to-the-minute information about trends that govern the popularity of fashions and of the designers and clothing vendors that cater to them. Further, by gathering a great deal of information in a single place, the maintainers of the site aim to convince major vendors to be more open with their customers about such concerns as their policies, their practices, and their respective supply chains.
Organizing the Text
The chief corpus of text, introduced by the subtitle “The Fashion Transparency Index 2020,” is difficult to read. It presents small, sans serif black characters—which are already challenging in the reader’s eyes—upon a light blue-gray background that scarcely offers sufficient contrast. The site would have been more alluring to the reader had the text instead been displayed in an easily read color combination, such as white font on a dark green background.
Using Graphics
Immediately beneath that section is a slide presentation. It is altogether non-obvious how to play the presentation, as the reader expects a forward-pointing triangle to be located on the timescale at the bottom of the slide window. The site instead offers a “>” symbol that can barely be discerned against the brilliant white and pink background. The presentation then offers an “Executive Summary” and detailed informational slides that are displayed in such a tiny font that they are all but worthless to the reader.
Providing Useful Content
Below the slide presentation window is a series of clickable pink bars, each displayed against a pink background. Once again, the choice of color shade is off-putting, making it difficult to read. At least, when the individual “>” symbols displayed on each bar are clicked upon, the text display that resultantly opens up is well spaced and exhibits a good choice of colors The displays also incorporate infographics that are logically constructed. These include displays of top brands, fast-moving brands, and the percentages of brands who publish lists of their suppliers, which is often a concern in light of the desperately poor working conditions evidenced in Asian clothing factories operated by the largest vendors (Hodal, 2018).
Continuing down the page, the site offers a histogram that scores the various brands according to a site-specific determination. Unfortunately, the manner in which the scores are calculated is not shared in detail. Moreover, every bar in the histogram is pink, once again making it difficult to distinguish the various data. At the same time, the text that annotates the bars of the histogram is rendered in tiny fonts that are all but impossible to read. The staff clearly devoted the closest attention to this segment, suggesting that they were more preoccupied with attribution and self-promotion than with presenting information to their audience in a facile, well-organized manner.
Conclusion
All in all, if you need free essay samples and examples of any complexity, you can always find them online at EssaysDot.com. The sponsors of the website have, all in all, not done a good job of combining text and graphics in a display that comes across as harmonious and well-organized. The preponderant use of garish colors and the frequency of employment of extremely small text both contributed deleteriously to the success of the sponsors’ conjoint mission of information conveyance and data visualization.
