TODAY1) Guests and video and adapting, oh

my! 2) Quickly: what do we need to do? 3) Post-video break4) Graphics: how do they work? 5) Group time6) Homework

Our guestsToday we are lucky to have some of the students from the ACE program here to visit with us.

We’re going to do two things: 1)Capture some interview video2)Talk with them about the documents we have done so far.

With video…Just a quick reminder of some things to remember with video.

1)Make sure you’re getting good sound.

2)Don’t forget the rule of thirds/to frame your interviewee

The Rule of Thirds is basically this: think of your visual images (including video footage) as being broken into 9 quadrants, like the image to the side. Key elements should appear at the intersections or on the lines themselves. In other words, don’t put an interview participant dead center in the frame: it’ll feel and look off when we watch the footage.

Good rule of thirds framing ona terrible slide :

Split into two groupsSome of you will be sharing your current designs with half of our guests and talking to them about their experiences/asking what they might want.

The other half of you will be capturing some video. For the first portion of this activity, all our guests will talk to the print group while the video folksget set up and ready.

And now we workCheck with me if you have questions or concerns. Otherwise, let’s focus on our work and see what we can do in the next hour-and-a-half or so.

Break time!411/511 students, it’s officially break time. Be back in about 15 minutes.

ACE students, thank you so much for coming in and for your help with our project! We really appreciate it!

ACE: we’ll do that again next week…

With any luck, we will have another set of ACE students to work with next week, so that should help us with gathering material and getting both our video project and the rest of our print work taken care of.

Transitioning: GraphicsFor today, you did a slew of readings on graphics and how to best use them in your both print and digital work. If you have questions from the readings, we can talk about that, but what I wanted to do first is give you a little different slant on things (like I did last week with the color stuff) by adding my voice to the mix in your heads. :)

Dr. Phill presents: the 6 things we do with

graphicsIn a society so intimately tied to the nature of the visual, we use graphics to do all sorts of heavy lifting in our design (and in our rhetoric). The following slides enumerate some common ways that we use graphics and offer examples of each.

Use 1: to EnticeYou will find that many graphics do more than one of the things on this list, but one of the most visceral uses of any graphics is to entice the audience, to give them something pretty, interesting, or awe inspiring to look at while considering your document.

This can take many forms.

Use 2: to Illustrate

Perhaps the most obvious use of an image is to illustrate something that is being written about, or literally to show the “thing” being shared.

Use 3: to InformSometimes graphics exist simply to offer information that the text either cannot share verbally or which is more user-friendly, or more dramatic, to be seen in image form.

Use 4: to Brand

Graphics– particularly here logos– are one of the most powerful ways to brand a product. In a world currently obsessed with marketing (even on the level of the individual), branding is a key element in current visual rhetoric.

Use 5: to Visually EnhanceSometimes graphics are present because they “spice up” a design that is otherwise bland. It’s from this particular use that we get the terminology “splash” art. These images usually do one of the other things as well, but their primary use is to enhance a layout or otherwise make the visual presence of something more pleasing.

Use 6: to Unify

Nothing pulls together a design like the use of a nice, crisp, clean graphic that can span the majority of a document or can through color or shape draw together what seem like disconnected elements.

Let’s use the rest of classTo work in our teams. Think about what you need to coordinate, what questions you have, where things are right now, etc. I will circulate to check in and ask questions.

For Next Week

Read: iMovie Tutorials

In class we will do some iMovie work, and we’ll talk with some additional ACE folks, then we’ll work, work, and work some more.