English 3110 Project–Visual Design

Overview
For this assignment, working in pairs, you will find a visual design document of mediocre quality, redesign it, and justify your redesign in a memo.

Your Tasks
You’re required to perform the following four tasks for this assignment:

1. Find a sample visual design document of mediocre quality.
This document can be of any kind: a flyer, a poster, a memo, a letter, a brochure, a web page, etc. Look for documents that have a balanced combination of text and graphics. Avoid those that have only graphics or only text. This document should be one-to-two pages. You could, of course, take one or two pages out of a longer document or a book, such as a technical manual, as long as that one or two pages form a relatively self-contained unit. The overall design quality of the document should be somewhere in the middle, not effective but not the worst design either.

2. Redesign the document to make it effective.
Identify the weak aspects of visual design with the original document and redesign it to improve its effectiveness. Your redesign should include both content design and visual design. Consider the rhetorical context of the design: audience, purposes, medium, constraints, etc.

For content design, consider the following aspects:

• is the right information selected?
• is the amount of information appropriate?
• is the level of technicality appropriate?
• is the information well organized?

For visual design, consider all the four major aspects:

• use of graphics (are graphics well designed? are they meaningfully related to the text? are they effectively used? are they appropriate? are they of good quality?)
• page layout (are different elements on the page logically laid out? are text and graphics placed at appropriate positions considering their relationships? is there a good balance between white space and text? are different textual elements properly formatted for visual hierarchy? does the formatting, for example, indicate clearly the different levels of headings?)
• typography (is the typeface, font size, or style appropriate?)
• use of color (is the document too plain in color or too colorful? is the use of colors justified? does the color serve the content and the purpose of the document?)

3. Write a memo to justify your redesign.
Write a memo to critique the original and justify your redesigns. Your intended audience for the memo is the person who designed the original document and who happens to be your boss. This factor certainly makes your memo writing a little more complex and challenging. You’re essentially communicating a negative message, but you don’t have the luxury of being blunt about the problems with the original design. Carefully consider such factors as the nature of your message, your audience’s feelings and possible reactions, your relationship with the audience, the potential consequences, etc.

In your memo to your boss, do not simply describe the look of document pages, but discuss its degree of success or failure, giving convincing reasons for your opinions. Don’t simply claim it’s good or bad. Instead, show the reader why it’s good or bad. For both your critique of the original and your justification of the redesign, make sure you discuss all the aspects in detail, with specific examples. Don’t give vague, general descriptions. What sections to include in your memo is up to you. Remember you’re both critiquing the original and justifying your revised version. In discussing the document design, consider such things as the intended audience(s) of the document, its purposes, the content design, the visual design, how the visual design complements the content design, how such a design serves its intended audiences and purposes, etc.

What to Turn in
You must turn in all of the following:

1. Memo, saved as “visual(YourLastNames)-memo,” e.g., “visual(GuSmith)-memo.”
2. Your redesign, saved as “visual(YourLastNames)-redesign.”
3. Original document, either hardcopy or electronic. If electronic, save it as “visual(YourLastName)-original.”

Email the above as Word attachments to me at bgu@gsu.edu.