A2 Brief – extremely important to read this carefully (under the assignments tab at Blackboard)!!! As well as the marking rubric to understand how you will be assessed in A2

student designing

Image captured from Youtube clip from link below.

Attention all students!

I am really needing to encourage everyone who may still be struggling with their concept and progressing their drafts – please really focus on imagining that you have just been given this brief as your first job as a professional by an organisation that you would love to work for. That organisation is running a campaign on promoting digital literacy in their operations, so your designed images/posters for this campaign really must convey strong coded meaning (using the visual literacies you have learnt from Week 7 and 8) targeted for this organisation’s desired audiences. The pair of concepts regarding digital literacy that you choose is the theme focus for your three images, so ensure you are very clearly picturing in your mind what your campaign theme is trying to get these audiences to understand about digital literacy promotion – in the particular way the theme helps you to express this.

pexels-photo

Image from pexel.com

Write your narrative about your process in terms of how you are constructing your images to convey meaning – using the codes we have all discussed, and keep your overall focus on really imagining how you would be convincing your managers at this organisation that you are designing them the best possible visual (and textual accompaniments to the images as much as you like) messages.

Keep bold at first in your design concepts so that you really engage with the designing software – Pixlr or Photoshop etc, and explain in detail why and how you are altering your images in particular ways. Show before and after of the original images to help your organisation understand your process. And keep in mind justifying how you are able to use your particular images at base (ethics protocol). Speak with your absorbed knowledges about all you have learnt along the way about digital literacy using visual and textual communication.

We will be revisiting digital literacy this next week to refamiliarise with the learning that we began with and the progress we’ve made in understanding should be obvious to you – and will help you to follow along with the ways to transform your images to best convey the meanings and signage etc that will really make strong messages for your desired audiences (and impress your imagined employer for this campaign).

Be confident and be prepared to make mistakes to ensure you reach your heights of meaning making. It is better to hone and finesse something daring, than not achieve what you desire because you are too afraid to experiment and learn along the way. As long as you really think clearly about what you are trying to say with your images (given all your new understandings) – and have imagined your organisation as it would really behave and decide – you will be able to stay focused and productive. And keep researching good sources that can help you along the way. Do more tutorials as you need. Keep asking for help. Keep your head down and prioritise now to glean the results you deserve.

Using Pixlr for adapting your own photo. Through experimenting while learning Pixlr I found that I’d worked backwards to arrive at brief – so …. perhaps not what to do…. but interesting for observing a creative process

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Original photograph taken under tower in Auckland CBD NZ

These images became first drafts in development, ie. 1st and 2nd drafts (using free play, and not with any specific organisation in mind).  I hope you have your organisation and prompts already in mind by now. I was just learning the Pixlr program a few weeks ago to be prepared to assist you, following tutorials to become familiar with the editing tools.

There was time then, but hopefully you were all practicing back then too, and have your organisation and prompts worked out. 

So, here I did everything backwards regarding what you should do forwards.

Using Pixlr image editing software and experimenting with adding colours, backgrounds, using paintbrushes and patterning in freehand, rubbing out, inserting text boxes, altering fonts and working with layers in the software, I decided to develop a message around the bat that I noticed I’d accidently created in the upper right corner of the first draft image.

This small sketchy image (framed by how your eye is drawn up the middle positioned, salient tower, so you look skywards as you scale it) became the inspiration for the message and logo I worked in, in the second image.

The message and logo were designed in further free play while doing further tutorials on more editing tools.

Then I thought about an organisation that would be likely to commission an ad campaign to promote Batpeople, and their superhero/ine feats. 

So I decide that I’m a photographer/designer who’s preparing a job for a civic-minded, philanthropic city council, for one of their advertising campaigns.

Lastly, my prompt – it was using participation/interaction, as I realised that Batpeople are a group that run joint programs with people with paraplegia and athletes, where both groups work together learning a virtual reality program on hangliding. The athletes are professional hangliders who know the physical demands and they can assist those with paraplegia in how to improve their game performance and experience. The people with paraplegia are more familiar with how to utilise special access software for virtual reality for those with disabilty, and can assist the athletes to learn this package concerning enhancing their performance capacity in that respect. The mutual benefit being, being able to appreciate and enhance understanding of the others world, perspective and context, and how digital technology supports both.

There’s obviously more text to come in further drafts, with likely more design work, to give more explanation to this poster. The given being on the left, familiar iconographic information concerning the well known Batman, and on the right, new information will be given in terms of who Batpeople are, and what the program is about (in more detail).

Writing a blog and posting

We will need to write a post that is at least 400 words long and it will need to be written in suitably academic language. In this first post we will be writing about the required course reading for Week 2 (and the further readings). You will need to critically reflect on the texts we covered, providing academic citations to support your observations. At least 3 citations are necessary, one must be from the readings and two from your independently researched sources. Your critique should include both positive critique (what you agreed with or found insightful in relation to your own experiences etc) and negative (what you found didn’t resonate well for you or flaws in the argument etc).