Due February 13

15 points

Read the first half of Robin Williams’ excellent The Non-Designer’s Design Book—through p. 72. You’ll find it easy to grasp and memorize the four design principles she lays out for you. And please do examine the design of this book as you read` to see how she incorporates her own principles.

By the way—here’s her website—and thanks to Alex Flores for directing me to it.

http://www.ratz.com/

2. Bring a couple of ads to class on Thursday to work on. You can pick up a copy of La Cocinita or another similar publication in most of our local eating establishments. The idea is to choose something smallish—something that looks like the Williams examples on pages 18 through 25—with sufficient information (text) that you’ll be able to try your hand at applying her principles. You’ll be discussing possible revisions with your row-mates on Thursday, and by the end of the period you should have some ideas about how you want to redesign one of the ads you’ve been examining.

3. Prepare for a lite quiz that may include some practical designing moves—4 points.

The task is to redesign your chosen ad according to Williams’s four principles: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. Think of yourself not as a well-trained professional graphics designer (not just yet!) but as an editor who does have some knowledge of design principles and who can apply them reasonably well. Prepare a memo addressed to me that explains the re-design decisions you’ve made. And be sure to attach a copy of the original. If you are already experienced in design, use your own method for taking on this project, but be sure to account for your decisions by referring to Williams’s principles in your memo. If you are new to graphics design, follow the steps in the order that William’s recommends and that we’ll go over in class. You can be low tech or high tech for this assignment: Note that Williams recommends cutting and pasting and rearranging and sketching in pencil. However, you will want to make good use of the available fonts and formatting features in MS Word, even if you wind up cutting and pasting elements together. If you want to use a graphics editor, please do. List of items to turn in: Copy of original ad; your re-design of the ad; memo addressed to me explaining the design decisions you made.

Due Date for redesign and memo is February 13, but that doesn’t mean you should not be working ahead on these even as you work on your resume project. If you’re smart, you’ll hand off a draft of your redesign to one or more of your row-mates for critique and feedback, but I won’t be monitoring that exchange. You can also run it by me if you wish—it’s optional. But you’ll have to give me sufficient time to look it over (an audience consideration, yes?).