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Writing Assignment 3


  1. Three.  Scenario: You have Information Design experience, but your team does not. They are skilled in their respective areas of expertise as writers, artists, engineers, planners, IT people, and so on, but have little practical experience navigating their way through the process of creating a successful design product and avoiding potential pitfalls on the way. You have the opportunity to work on a project that, if all goes well, will lead to your team's design being implemented by a company or other client. In other words, you get paid rather than having your proposal abandoned at some point during its creation.

    Create a document for your team members that outlines the various stages of an interactive and successful design process. Use chapters two and three of IDW, especially pp 50ff, for suggestions, though do not feel limited to this text's ideas or feel compelled to summarize all their examples.

    Design.
    Ok, let's make our documents graphically pleasing and user friendly. Does your document look good if you're far enough away that you can't read the words? Use principles of good design to design your document. I don't want more text than would fill two pages single spaced within paragraphs & double spaced between, but you can have more pages if your formatting calls for it. Adjust font size & margin to achieve an ideal line length. What does Bringhurst say is the ideal line length for a one-column document?  What is the official term typographers use instead of line length?

    Our computers will display 16 million colors; when it comes to document design, we mostly use 2 (black & white). So for this assignment, make your page color and font color anything BUT black and white. Here is an example of a pamphlet I designed as an offspring of my web site. Look at the colors, background, and overall esthetic of the file. Notice that I used a background image rather than a color for my document. In your document, make font family, boldface, font style, font color, or font size changes to make your headings distinctive. Just for kicks, let's take kerning out for a spin. Use kerning for one of the levels of headings to enhance them. I'll evaluate according to the quality of the content, the appearance of the document, and of course the level of writing errors I come across.


    Also, please do not submit work as zipped files. I can open them, but not through Moodle. Further, remember that business and other technical documents do not indent paragraphs.

    Let me know if you have questions, and be aware that I'll be posting discussion board topics soon for the next two weeks. 

  
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