Text design as a communicative means to represent corporate identity on company websites

Master's Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Design (Industry, Graphics, Fashion), grade: excellent (A), University of Portsmouth, language: English, abstract: Text design is a notion, which has so far not been investigated extensively in communication theory. However, or just because of that, it provides an interesting field of research. This dissertation focuses on the perspective of the communicator, the copywriter, who has to manage multimodal elements to achieve an inherently coherent design. Thereby an important part of business communication is included: the representation of corporate identity. Beiersdorf and L'Oréal are successful companies in the global health and beauty sector and are both market leaders in their respective countries. Using the example of their homepages, the main aim of this study is to show, how text design contributes to the purpose of image representation. Moreover, the perspective of the communicator is foregrounded, establishing a concept for copywriters to approach a text compilation process. Under the aforementioned premise of showing to what extent text design features contribute to the purpose of presenting an intended image, the front pages of the two websites are analysed and compared. In order to initiate the analysis, a theoretical framework is constructed, which simultaneously serves two purposes: firstly, it is used as an analysing tool to approach the homepages in question and secondly, it is evaluated in order to ascertain whether or not this framework might be applied by professional copywriters in a text compilation process for websites. The practical part shows that the intended image has a crucial impact on the way text is designed. The constructed framework proves useful as an analysing tool. However, the results emphasise that the focus in this project is far too narrow for practical implementation in a professional context. The outlook suggests an extension of the created framework in order to make it applicable as a supportive tool for copywriters.