Peer response on campaign plan drafts (45-60 min)
Group up and get your draft in presentable form for your counterpart group. About 10 minutes.
Email your draft to each of the counterpart group members. As a group, read it over and talk what you liked about it and what you might offer up as a potential revision in response to each of the questions for the prompt. Here they are again, from the syllabus (about 10-15 min):
-What attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, behaviors would you like to change or encourage?
-Who do you hope to reach? Why is this audience key to addressing your topic?
-What kinds of documents will your group be producing?
-Multiple media and compositions are typically used to address modern issues. What media will you use?
-What modes (e.g., sound, static image, video, alphanumeric writing)?
-How will your documents reach your target audience? How will they see it, how will it get to them? In other words, how will you attempt to circulate these documents?
-What “themes” might bleed over across documents and how will you make that happen?
-Have a rationale. Why did you choose this kind of writing and media? For instance, why did you decide that your audience would respond better to a poster rather than a video? Why deliver this document at this time? Why these documents in this order? Why that document in that medium? Why do you believe your strategies for circulating your writing are effective?
-What have other people and organizations produced about this issue? What genres of writing? What sorts of audiences have they targeted? What media was used? What modes (sound, image, video, alphanumeric writing, etc.)? How might you adapt/build on what others have done? Or, how might you do something very different?
Also, have questions ready for things you weren’t sure about. Be a generous reader, but keep in mind that a generous reader is still a helpful reader.
When done talking it out with your group, write up your responses to their campaign plan. You need not address each question from the prompt, but instead what you found most salient in terms of what you thought was really smart in their plan and what you thought they could think about in terms of revision (sometimes, these can be the same thing!) About 10 minutes.
Email back your group’s response.
Visual Rhetoric (again) and Copyright (10-20 min)
Who has their images from last time? How can images themselves have meaning, what can they do that words can’t? We talked elderly pamphlet about setting a mood, I heard “subliminally” I think last class. What else? How do you incorporate images to supplement or even stand in for text?
What do you think of this example in regard to these questions? (go to BB to download)
Ok, copyright. Many of you got comments from me on this. It is confusing. I don’t totally know what the right answer is for use of figures, charts, and tables. Go to the WFP Resources page under the Images header for more on this. To be safe, I recommend not doing this, because there is potential you are violating copyright. Instead, recreating the image and attributing the source is probably the best way to go.
Break (15 min)
Design and Accessibility (20-30 min)
What do you value about design? (list on board). Now, going to Park (2006), pick out your favorite two examples of what you value about design that can be found in that text. Let’s talk some.
Ok, let’s look at some blog post excerpts that mostly touch on accessibility and design.
- In general, I’ve come to the conclusion that the balance between good design and accessibility is not a 50/50 split. It is more of a 60/40, in good design’s favor. Although what the writer chooses to make accessible is most likely the reason for writing the piece, it cannot become accessible without good design. I think the best choice the writer has is to sort their information separately, then combine. In order to cut down time from the redesign process, organizing their thoughts and creating a template for their piece should be done separately, then putt the text into the template while prioritizing what the reader needs to see. Good design, when done right, works in favor of accessibility.
- The idea of accessibility, while it may be very similar to proper design, has a few aspects that make it a standalone issue that every writer needs to address. For most writing, these concepts go hand in hand. A properly designed text, for example, should be easily accessible for all readers. This is because one of the major ideas within design is an “intuitive” reading process. Therefore, accessibility should be a consequence of design. It should not, however, be the other way around. If a writer writes the paper to be solely accessible, they can easily make major design flaws that hinder the documents effectiveness. For example, if a company put out an ad for their indoor trampoline park, but only focused on the organization of the material, the ad would become boring. While it would be easy for the parents to find the information they need, it would be lacking when it comes to grabbing their attention. If the company were to focus on design first and made it fun and exciting, they could then adjust it later to also be easily accessible.
- Although in some cases accessibility can be an inconvenience for certain designs, a design cannot really be considered effective if you are eliminating a whole segment of the potential population of readers by not making the format accessible for them. Accessibility is all about reassuring that anyone in the public can be able to understand a message being communicated to them regardless of whether they are a part of the intended audience.
- There are still parts of good design that clash with accessibility. Color scheme is most prominent in this case. For any reader who is blind or colorblind, a color scheme has no effect. Consequently, much like the article on accessibility said, color alone cannot be used to tell the message of the document. This would cause its accessibility to plummet. Reversely though, the color scheme is vital to a good design. It balances the document, highlights important parts with contrast, and creates the overall sense of unity needed to appease the reader. Therefore, there will always be some form of conflict between accessibility and good design in this aspect and a balance must be found.
Questions I had:
How do accessibility and design clash?
How do they do the same work?
What about sight and hearing disabilities?
What about color? Did the color theory article make you rethink anything about using color?
What about print and digital differences? What about accessibility and hyperlinks?
What about images or color taking on too much meaning?
White Paper and Design; Remediation as Digital (30 min)
What’s this white paper after? What is the goal, what is the problem described, what is the recommendation made? What about the design? What values have we listed are working here? What else could be thought about in terms of design for possible revisions?
Let’s remediate as a webpage. How would you utilize the affordances of digital spaces to try something else here?
[sign up for conferences while working]
Admin. (5-15 min)
Before you go, sign up for a conference time. We will meet for about 10 minutes during the week of October 17th.
Also, I’d like you to email me about your campaign piece idea by this Friday. I’ll give brief thoughts via email.