An author may begin with building themes, gathering motifs, and adding notes on topics worthy of mention in the text. One can proceed from a concept, some scattered images, textual fragments, and grow the hypertext from any point. Like a book, a clear and simple interface keeps users focused upon the content. Visuals can be inserted that relate, or may create a creative distance, between image and text. This stretches the viewer to comprehend and draw a conceptual connnection.
Hypermedia is a rapid reading experience of image, caption, and choice of navigation.
In designing hypertexts, the chunks of narrative text are at times a single idea on a page worth recounting or teaching, a unique discovery or rediscovery. This is a narrative form friendly to aphorists, thinking in terse, dense chunks in the tradition of Chamfort, Wilde, Cioran, or signage artist Jenny Holzer. A single idea upon a screen is often quite enough, packaged with a single image. My own hypertexts have been works where visuals are given nearly equal weight as words, the same onscreen real estate. The pictorial element on the screen accompanying the text may be an illustration with a direct visual correspondence, or can be a graphic which forces the viewer to make a conceptual leap.