Media Management and Production I: The Grammar of Electronic Media; Communication Design Theories and Practice; Media Production Techniques for Print and Electronic Media; and Digital Media Production Techniques

Communication design arranges words, images and space so that a message is noticed, understood and remembered. Its main theoretical base is Gestalt psychology, which holds that people perceive organised wholes rather than separate parts. The Gestalt principles used in design are proximity (items near each other are seen as a group), similarity (items that look alike are grouped), closure (the mind completes incomplete shapes), continuity (the eye follows lines and curves), and figure-ground (we separate an object from its background). Design principles build on these: balance (symmetrical or asymmetrical), contrast, emphasis and a focal point, rhythm and repetition, proportion, alignment, unity, and white space.

Typography is the art of setting type. Serif typefaces, with small strokes at the ends of letters, are traditional for long printed text; sans-serif faces are common for headlines and screens. Type is measured in points, 72 points to an inch; leading is the space between lines, kerning the space between particular pairs of letters, and tracking the overall letter spacing. Colour works differently on screen and paper: screens use additive RGB colour (red, green and blue light add up to white), and printing uses subtractive CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks absorb light, and the key plate, K, is black). Colours are described by hue, saturation and value, and combined as complementary (opposite on the colour wheel), analogous (neighbours) or triadic schemes. Reading paths shape layout: the Gutenberg diagram, associated with Edmund Arnold, has the eye enter at the top left and leave at the bottom right of an evenly weighted page; simple pages are scanned in a Z pattern, and text-heavy web pages in the F pattern found by the Nielsen Norman Group's eye-tracking (2006). Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983) set the principles of information design, including maximising the data-ink ratio and avoiding "chartjunk".

Johannes Gutenberg's movable metal type and press in Mainz, around 1440 to 1450, began the print era; the first press in India was set up by Jesuits in Goa in 1556. Hot-metal composition on the Linotype machine, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1886, set whole lines of type at once and ran newspapers for most of a century; phototypesetting replaced it from the 1960s; and desktop publishing, which arrived in 1985 with the Apple Macintosh, Aldus PageMaker and the LaserWriter printer, put page design on the editor's screen. Production today runs through pre-press (writing, editing, design and layout in software such as InDesign or QuarkXPress, proofing, imposition and plate-making, now usually computer-to-plate), press (printing) and post-press (cutting, folding, binding and distribution).

Photographs are printed as halftones, patterns of dots of varying size that the eye blends into tones; screen frequency is measured in lines per inch, coarse for absorbent newsprint and fine for coated magazine paper. Colour pictures are separated into the four CMYK plates and printed in register. Newspapers print on web-fed presses from continuous reels, which is fast and cheap per copy; sheet-fed presses print on individual sheets for quality work.

Radio and television production runs in three stages. Pre-production covers the idea, research, script, storyboard (a sequence of drawings of planned shots), budget, schedule, casting and location recce. Production is the recording. Post-production covers editing, sound mixing, music, graphics, colour correction and grading, and mastering. Television scripts often use the two-column audio-visual format, with video instructions on the left and the corresponding audio on the right. In a studio, multi-camera production switches between several cameras live in the production control room (PCR), where the director and vision mixer work, while the master control room (MCR) manages what goes to air; single-camera production records shots separately for editing, as in documentaries and dramas. Studio lighting commonly uses three-point lighting: a key light (the main source), a fill light (softening the shadows the key creates) and a back light (separating the subject from the background).

Radio formats include the news bulletin, talk, interview, discussion, phone-in, feature, documentary, drama, magazine programme and jingle. A radio studio has an on-air or production studio with microphones and a console (mixer) that combines sources, fades them and sets levels. Microphones differ in how they work and where they listen. Dynamic microphones are rugged and suited to field and live use; condenser microphones are more sensitive and suited to studios; ribbon microphones give a warm sound. By pick-up pattern, an omnidirectional microphone hears equally from all sides, a cardioid (heart-shaped pattern) hears mainly from the front and rejects sound from the rear, which suits a single speaker in a noisy place, and a bidirectional or figure-of-eight microphone hears front and back, which suits two people facing each other.

Digital production replaced tape and film with files. Non-linear editing (NLE) software, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer and DaVinci Resolve, gives random access to any frame and edits non-destructively, leaving the original footage untouched, whereas linear editing copied shots in sequence from one tape to another. Digital audio workstations such as Audacity or Pro Tools do the same for sound. A video's quality depends on resolution (HD 1280 × 720, Full HD 1920 × 1080, 4K UHD 3840 × 2160 pixels), frame rate (24 frames per second for cinema, 25 for the PAL standard used in India, about 30 for NTSC), aspect ratio (4:3 for old television, 16:9 widescreen, 9:16 vertical for phones), and bit rate, the amount of data per second after compression. Codecs such as H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC) compress video lossily; audio for video is usually sampled at 48 kHz, music CDs at 44.1 kHz.

Three calculations recur. Frames: 20 seconds of PAL video at 25 frames per second contain 25 × 20 = 500 frames. Resolution: a 16:9 frame 1,080 pixels high is 1,080 × 16 ÷ 9 = 1,920 pixels wide, and has 1,920 × 1,080 = 20,73,600 pixels. File size: a clip encoded at 8 megabits per second for one minute holds 8 × 60 = 480 megabits, which is 480 ÷ 8 = 60 megabytes. Beyond the numbers, digital production has changed practice: mobile journalism (MoJo) uses a smartphone with a microphone, stabiliser and editing app to shoot, edit and file from the field; podcasts extend radio production to on-demand audio; and multimedia long-form stories combine text, video, graphics and interactivity, a form popularised by the New York Times's "Snow Fall" (2012). Responsive web design, which adapts layout to screen size, and content management systems complete the toolkit.