A Blog has the same reading paradox as a manga!

When I was showing my work from my blog, someone said something interesting: "the problem with blogs is that they're the wrong way around". Actually, in the design logic, it isn't. When the readers open a blog, they get to see the latest news/post from the blog. That's one problem: if you're a follower from the start of the blog it's ok, because you get straight to what you want, but if you're new to this, you don't want to start reading the blog from the end? But this is just a design choice favouring the devoted followers of a blog over the new arrivals.

My analogy with mangas comes from the design choice forth-mentioned. The paradox is this: we read from left to right, and top to bottom, but blogs display their texts left to right and top to bottom, but the order of the posts are chronologically ordered bottom to top! So you have to read the post top to bottom, but go back on top to read the next post.

Where do mangas come in you might ask? Well it's simple: Japanese read right from left... And there comes the design decision when adapting a manga say into English: do we invert the picture allowing everything to flow left to right/top to bottom but have the characters left and right swapped around (swapping the image around on the vertical axis). Or! Do we leave the picture as it was originaly, but creating a new rule of reading: the text is read left to right, but the images are read right to left... Most choose the latter.

Design. It makes us have to choose. It demands logic, and in this case a decision of what to put first.


To the left: a "how to read" guide found before page 1 of some mangas.