While I have made many newsletters in the past, this was my first content based newsletter based on facts and not just informing my audience. I like how the assignment was open to interpretation but this also caused me a lot of issues getting started as it was so wide open I did not know exactly what was expected but thankfully it was very clear how it was being graded. That is the only thing I would change about the assignment as the wide open assignment is great for creative style people but for practical based people like myself it was confusing. There were two things that helped me get started, one was the posted web conference where I could research what was discussed and expected in further detail. The second was the article from A. Lamb, where I read about starting with an audience and a purpose. Lamb made me focus on the main and secondary interest of my audience, our staff. While they are mostly interested in engaging and motivating their students, I also know they are interested in learning more about 21st century technology tools and are personally interested outside of work in things like social networking and Skype. By thinking of these secondary interests of my audience as well as my purpose of motivating while disseminating information that Lamb suggested, I feel I was able to create a newsletter that was personally and professionally appealing for my targeted audience (Lamb, 2005).
The most important thing I learned while creating my newsletter was the importance of citing my sources. As obvious at that sounds, I realized the importance of providing the audience with those citations in order to present the content as more professional, more reliable, and give them the opportunity to go to the link to further research, before this course assignment I thought of citations as merely an expected formality. I will definitely use this new understanding of citations in my future newsletters and other published works like my blog.
The other main thing I learned was the usefulness of white space, although I know I have lots more to learn on how to use this, as it goes against my being. In the past I believed white space was used to make things appear to be lined up (think the white space between pictures in a collage). I always try to cram as much information as possible into things I publish from a newsletter to our school yearbook. I figure the less pages of a newsletter the better so people don’t see it as a 5 page newsletter and just throw it away because it’s too long. With the yearbook, I cram as many photos as possible into the set number of pages. White space has never been of importance to me until I read the article by Dr. Yearwood where he points out that “the white space has been thoughtfully used to allow the reader’s eye to flow among and into the elements without getting trapped” (2009). Taking this idea into mind I tried with my newsletter and will continue to try to add more white space so there is a focal point that draws the attention of the reader and so that the reader is not overwhelmed and “trapped” in the elements resulting in “clutter and illegibility” (Yearwood, 2009). I plan to use this new understanding of white space while creating my school yearbook this year which will result in less massive collages and more focal points with supporting smaller images, I believe it will make my elementary yearbook look more professional like the high school yearbooks appear.
The newsletter assignment was also great way to apply the four elements of design. I focused specifically on the new elements I learned about in this course: repetition and contrast to make the newsletter most appealing to my audience and useful for my professional purpose of educating the staff on 21st century technology tools. After reading about how “contrast is the single most important element in design” I tried to use contrast of colors to “make the design come to life” (Yearwood, 2009). I focused a lot on repetition with the fonts in the article and headlines, the alignment of the articles, the image size associated with each article because I read about how “alignment reminds this visual cortex of the brain that there is something similar here, and this suggests there is a type of unity in the design”. I am always very focused on the third element of alignment because I am a bit “OCD” with things being straight and lined up, which comes in handy while creating things like our school yearbook, and worked great for this element in designing my newsletter. After being a yearbook editor for many years, the element of proximity comes somewhat naturally as well. I plan to continue using these elements to make my things I publish stand out from the rest and along with my personal logo provide a professional, useful, technology centered brand for myself.
References
Lamb, A. (2005). Planning Newsletters. Retrieved from http://eduscapes.com/sessions/publishing/planning.html
Yearwood, J. (2009, July). Basic Elements of Page Design.
Yearwood, J. (2009). Design Principles.
No comments:
Post a Comment