#1: CAMPAIGN LOGO REDESIGN SPECIFICATIONS
STEP ONE: Review some of the logos developed for the 2020 U.S. Presidential candidates.
STEP TWO: Select one of the campaign logos as your target for this assignment.
STEP THREE: Prepare a brief redesign specifications report (between 750-1,000 words) in memo form, addressed to the candidate and the candidate''s leadership team in which you first critique the existing logo and then propose steps to improve upon it for a 2020 campaign run. Your critique and proposal both must address at least: typography, color, graphic elements, and their likely impact on the intended audience(s). While you are not expected to deliver a completed revised logo, your critique should be paired with specific suggestions. You are encouraged, where possible, to link these sugestions to the theoretical work that we have been reading -- and while a memo for a real campaign whould probably not cite academic theory directly, I’m looking for strong support for your claims, so please append a brief "Works Cited”. Please also strongly consider using multiple images to help build your argument. They really help audiences connect with your ideas.
STEP FOUR: Deliver the finished report to me by 11:59pm Friday, February 15, 2020. Please do not send PDF files, as they are difficult for me to mark up.
#2: ONE-PAGE VISUAL METHODOLOGY GUIDE
Step One: Choose one of the methodologies in Gillian Rose's Visual Methodologies that you believe to be especially pertinent to your own scholarly or professional work. We will assign methodoogies in class to avoid too much dupllication.
Step Two: Develop a one-page (front-and-back) introduction and reference guide to this methodology for your fellow students. In this assignment, please develop an overall look and feel that resonates with your chosen methodology, and incorporate at least one graphic element on each side of the page. Please pursue a rough balance of text and images with 2/3 text being the upper limit for text and half images being the upper limit for image content. Your primary audience for this project is your peers in class. Your decisions should be driven by what you believe will be most helpful to your colleagues as they consider a range of methodologies for their upcoming projects.
Step Three: Take steps to ensure that your project, however rich graphically, remains printable.
Step Four: Know that I am aware that many of you are not trained designers, but also know that I am asking you to at least experiment with the placement of text and images on this single page.
Step Five: Deliver the finished guide in PDF format to our shared classwide Canvas folder by Noon Wednesday, March 18.
#3 FINAL PROJECT ASSIGNMENT
This class is directed at encouraging you to immerse youself in the still-developing field of visual rhetoric. As much in this field is new, our final assignment is left largely open to encourage you to pursue 21st century approaches to promoting persuasion, identification, or adherence in the richly visual spaces enabled by current technologies. In short, I am asking you to explain how and whether a specific instance or a category of visual argument(s) works for its intended audience(s). I also want to demonstrate how and why this argument (these arguments) succeed(s) or fail(s), or ends up somewhere else along a spectrum that you define with respect to its(their) persuasive goals.
The big picture is that I am asking you to devote over a month of your time to this project, and to deliver a finished product that reflects engagement with theoretical, scholarly, and critical work in visual rhetoric. There are two ways I am encouraging you to pursue this goal.
1) PAPER OPTION: Pursue a traditional academic paper of at least 2500 words (roughly 10 pages) addressing a challenging issue, problem, or concern in visual communication. In recognition of specific context surrounding this paper, I will add the following requirements: A) All papers must cite no fewer than five (5) scholarly or theoretical works addressing visual communication. B) All papers must offer no fewer than three (3) images that relate to the core argument and can fairly be said to participate in the argument. In other words, the paper should not depend solely upon textual argument to make its points. I will be evaluating papers not only in terms of what they say, but how they say it (with an eye toward the look and feel of the arguments as expressed on the page). In short, this paper is one where you probably ought to think twice before settling for the default font in your word processor.
2) PROJECT OPTION: With the above paper guidelines in mind, develop a similarly weighted project (examples include, but are not limited to: a slideshow "deck"; a mini-website; a conceptual "map"; or some sort of multimedia gesamtkunstwerk). While I recognize that traditional scholarly citations might interrupt the flow of some projects, I require projects that do not involve traditional academic citations (or their near equivalent) to feature, as an addendum, a brief annotated listing of at least five (5) scholarly or theoretical works consulted with paragraph-long explanations of how these works informed the project. As implied by the above examples, the project option will also be judged, in significant part, by the look and feel of the finished work, and whether, in my judgment, the project is visually persuasive.
PAPER/PROJECT TIMELINE
: Deliver one page (250 words or so) paper/project proposals to me via e-mail, by midnight.
: Receive proposal approval or constructive criticism from me (with direction for revision, if needed).
: In-class pecha-kucha presentations
: In-class pecha-kucha presentations
: All projects and presentations due, in final form, via GoogleDrive, by 5pm.
NOTE: Until formally presented in a classroom meeting these assignments are to be understood as drafts. I reserve the right to tweak or change them in order to serve the needs of this specific class.