What is DPS & What Does It Do?

What is DPS & What Does It Do?
DPS:

As is often said, but rarely practiced, “Planning is Everything.” In developing a DPS, that quote is an invaluable piece of advice. If suggestions in the preceding articles have borne fruit, you now have a reasonable subject, goal and outline. Our planning process can continue with some basic formatting concepts.
By incorporating this basic set of formatting rules, designed to complement each other from the beginning, your study is much less likely to end up as a non-functional collection of electrons.
Please note: Rather than experimenting and possibly coming to the same conclusions as outlined hereafter, the following criteria are suggested as a starting point for your new DPS. There’s no requirement to follow every detail strictly, or even at all, but points in this portion of our ‘DPS Cookbook’ may save you time in getting your study up and running quicker.



Rules of Engagement
We’ll begin with a guiding principle for our DPS:

• The DPS should be ‘viewed comfortably’ on computer screens (this is what digital is all about).

So, how do our ‘formatting rules’ ensure our DPS is viewed comfortably and available to most everyone regardless of computing platform?
To realize comfortable viewing, our DPS must have consistent presentation.
Consistency quickly provides viewers a feeling of ‘familiarity’ and the document’s ‘ease of use’ factor increases. To develop consistency, we’ll define a common layout, text and graphic styles for headers, paragraphs, etc. for use throughout the study.

Physical Size
Beginning with a physical format often helps me to ‘see’ what I’m doing. To help you ‘see’ what you’re doing, take a standard sheet of writing paper and turn it horizontal so it’s 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches high.
In general, computer screens are capable of displaying horizontal documents better than vertical documents. We’ll take advantage of that real estate and develop our ‘Formatting Guide’ with this in mind as it’s also a common format for PowerPoint presentations.
I’m going to get a slight bit ‘techie’ here, so please don’t let your eyes glaze over immediately.
Computer screens use a display measurement known as pixels per inch (ppi). You may have also heard the term ‘dots per inch’ (dpi) which is a printing measurement. Although not precise, let’s simplify things and use these terms interchangeably.
Windows computer screens display a standard of 96 dpi and naturally, the larger the screen, the more dots are displayed. To accommodate most everyone’s computer monitor we’ll use a presentation size of 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high. 1024 pixels wide is approximately 10.6 inches wide and 768 pixels is 8 inches high. (Macintosh screens display at 72 dpi. The 1024 x 768 screen equals approximately 14.2 inches wide by 10.6 inches high.)



Page and Screen Size
Thinking in terms of that writing paper we used previously, we see we’re dealing with a screen display roughly the same size as our sheet of writing paper turned sideways – electronically!
Super. Now that we can visualize the screen area we have to work with, we can even sketch some things out by hand or make notes to remind us of what belongs on which page.



Page Margins
To keep it simple as well as getting the most space out of our computer screen real estate or 1024×768 pixels, we’re not going to use fancy colored or graphic page outlines in our study. They can reduce the available area quite a bit and we need that area for our overall page.
The page margin will be a minimum of 0.5 inches on all sides, ensuring headers and footers are within the main content area. This gives us a working area of roughly 9.5 inches wide and 7 inches high. 



BUT THEN WE COMPAIRED OUR RESULTS IN LESSON WITH THE REST OF THE GROUP AND THEY HAD THE SIMPLE DEFINITION OF DPS WHICH TURNS OUT TO CORRECT ALTHOUGH I THOUGHT THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN TOO OBVIOUS!

Double Page Spread. 

Its a layout that covers two facing pages in a magazine or newspaper. If the layout is in the center of a magazine or newspaper, it is called a centre spread.
In advertising, double-page spreads are very costly and are usually used only when the advertiser is making some special announcement, such as the introduction of a new product, or a new brand promotion. So therefore, budgetting is a very important factor when considering the layout.
Also, a double page spread can be used through interactive advertising and has been used to its advantage & full potential in many DPS when advertising.