Visual Design

Technical Writing 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?)

What to Turn in
Email your redesign, saved in the following format: “visual(YourNames),” to me at bgu@gsu.edu.