English 3120 (Digital Writing and Publishing), Dr. Ashley Holmes, Spring 2015
My target audience for the project is for anyone who is interested in music and lives in the Atlanta area. I focused on showcasing bands whose members who around my age, so, the main audience could focus in on young people in their 20s- early 30s.
The purpose of the project was to create a niche blog and focus on the Atlanta community. It also had to be something that I cared about on a personal level (I currently live in Atlanta and love to listen to music).
I chose this project for my portfolio because it was one of my favorite projects that I worked on at Georgia State University. I love the city of Atlanta and our local music scene, so to be able to put the two together to create a blog was very rewarding.
I think the main strength of the project is the blog’s overall appearance. I used WordPress and found a great layout, using large photographs as header and masthead images to draw in the reader’s attention. I also interviewed two of my friends who play in bands in Atlanta and posted them to the blog.
The main weakness of the blog is the body text. If I could go back and revise it, I would probably use bold face font to accentuate headings and utilize more spacing for easier readability.
(screenshot from the Local Atlanta Bands blog)
Hashtag Activism
English 3120 (Digital Writing and Publishing), Dr. Ashley Holmes, Spring 2015
My target audience for the project was for any users of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and those who are interested in enabling social change.
The purpose of the project was to create an iconographic that somehow involved social media and its impact on issues. Having heard a great deal about the effect that social media had on the Black Lives Matter movement, I decided to focus on hashtag activism and how it can evoke change in society.
I chose this project for my portfolio because it was a challenge in trying to gather research for. The process used in making the iconographic itself was effortless; I used Piktochartw to design it. Overall, aside from research and design, this project taught me that an iconograph can serve as a rhetorical device that conveys meaning and argument.
I think the main strength of the project is the iconograph’s overall appearance. It follows a similar color scheme (blue, to match both Facebook and Twitter) as well as the use of icons and images. Overall, it is clean and easy to read.
The main weakness of the blog is the body text. If I could go back and revise it, I would probably use bold face font to accentuate headings and utilize more spacing for easier readability.
English 3115 (Multimodal Composition), Dr. Mary Hocks, Fall 2014
The target audience for the project was broad: intended for anyone who enjoys to read and appreciates the art design on a book’s cover.
The assignment for the class was to create a blog with a central idea. It was a group project and had several roles: my job was to be the design and layout editor of the blog. I was to make sure that the blog was clean and presentable and also allowed for the reader to view everything in an easy way. My group focused on presented different genres of fiction and how different countries, time periods, and culture influence the way a book cover is designed.
I chose this project because it focused on the art design of book covers and how different elements contribute to their design. It was an interesting project that required a lot of research, but it was fascinating and fun to participate in.
The main strength of the project is its content. Our group had many different artifacts to present on the blog, making it robust and interesting to look through.
If I could change something about the blog, I would clean it up a little bit. The background makes the blog a little distracting and takes away from the content of the project. I would make the blog more simple and easier to read.
(screenshot from Beneath the Covers)
The Quirky Quibbler (password: english3140)
English 3140 (Editing For Publication), Professor Jocelyn Heath, Fall 2015
The target audience for the piece is for anyone who loves the Harry Potter series and enjoys reading fan fiction.
This project was a collaborative editorial project that I shared with two other classmates. Each of us had an assigned task and role. There was a managing editor who oversaw the entire project as a whole, a copyeditor who found the pieces online and editing them for us, and my role, the layout and design editor of the Tumblr. It was my job to post the edited pieces and make sure the overall appearance of the blog was clean and easy to read.
I selected this item because it showed what a great collaborative project looks like. I prefer working by myself rather than in a group, but it was great exposure to what actual editing professions are like: everyone works as a team.
The main strength of the blog is its overall appearance and that the content is consistent throughout. We were able to hone in on a very specific niche: fan fiction and Harry Potter. The works on the blog are easy to read.
If I could go back and edit the piece, I would probably add images through the blog to add dimension and heighten the appearance.
English 4320, Dr. Robin Wharton, Spring 2016