This class prepares students to work with the visual elements of textual communication – page design, graphic design, webpage design, poster design. Design is an academic and professional discipline that requires years of study, in many cases both undergraduate and graduate, and that study is not done in English departments. For our purposes, we consider ourselves to be writers who, because of the functionality and demands of contemporary computer word processing technology, must know something about the principles of proper design. Thus our goal is to be able to do quality, basic layout and design work and to be able to talk sensibly to professional designers. We will work through a series of projects that address successively greater skill at designing and analyzing visual design. After midterm students work on a project with a “real world” client, either creating or re-designing a document, website, poster, or other form of professional communication. These projects may be group projects involving up to 5 people if the scope of work is sufficient to insure that each person will have a significant product to show for his or her effort. There is a “software requirement”: students must develop and demonstrate facility (not mastery) of a visual design program other than MS-Word or MS-Powerpoint that they have not previously been familiar with OR develop mastery of the visual elements of Word and Powerpoint. The class is taught in a computer classroom.