rlross's blog

In the final week of the Service Learning Project, all that was left for me to do was consider all final revisions. I offered my final thoughts on the brochure, including grammatical errors and eliminating all hyphenated words. From there, I concentrated my interest on the flyer. One revision I made to the flyer was to delete the phrase “Fringe Festival” as suggested by the client. Also, I deleted the purple graphic of the hands and grape because it made the flyer too cluttered.

This week, I contributed to the efforts of group three by finishing my design for the flyer so my group members could see the ideas I had. I tried explaining how I envisioned the flyer, but received no encouraging feedback to continue with the idea. Therefore, I completed the flyer with graphics, text, color, and alignment to see what my group members thought of the finished product. It turns out that my flyer appeared to have too many things going on within the little space provided. Roxy and I worked together discussing ideas that would best fit our client for the flyer.

According to this tool for reviewing brochures, the brochure that our group created needs a little work if it is going to make a favorable impression on its audience. The tool offers nine different areas of the brochure to analyze. I will list the title of each area and then give my response to each section.

Appeal to Emotions

Attached is the brochure, New York flyer, and Minnesota flyer that Group 3 has created for the Tantalus Theatre Group.

This week, I fulfilled my group obligations by successfully doing my assigned portion and actively contributing to group discussions. My duty is to select relevant graphics for the brochure and flyer. I even exceeded my responsibilities by offering ideas for the sections we should use for each of the six panels of the brochure. I check our group’s wiki probably five or six times a day ready to reply or suggest new ideas.

These chapters in the Thompson Handbook – Chapters 24 and 37 – were very informative and will be useful information for the Service Learning Project and in the future when I have to create documents with graphic content. As the book states, the occasions where visual content must be produced has multiplied in today’s digital world so this newly gathered information will be applicable at many points in my life. I thought the picture on page 558 of the Thompson Handbook with the caption, “Computer Age Ending Literature,” proves the point that a picture is worth a thousand words.

This week was the first week of the Service Learning Project. After being excited to do the project for SHARP, they backed out and we now have to create a brochure and flyer for Tantalus Theatre Group. In an effort to start producing these documents, I put out the idea on our group’s wiki of first listing all the activities necessary to complete the assignment. From there, we would then delegate responsibility according to who would do the best at each spot. Theresa came right out and said she wanted to do the final formatting of the brochure.

Attached is the Gantt Chart for Group 3. This is our schedule so that all group members can stay on task and be on the same page. Group 3 members include: myself, Theresa Akre, Sarah Keeker, and Roxy Smolarczyk.

Reading Chapter 25 in the Thompson Handbook gave me some insightful information to use when our group creates our brochure and flyer. I learned a lot about the principles of graphic design from the descriptions and good use of examples in the text, but the most important thing for me was the section about typography. Now I understand the importance of using different fonts for the body text and the headings. I first learned this rule after I submitted my resume rough draft, but this chapter expanded my knowledge by giving me a rule of thumb to distinguish serif fonts from sans-serif fonts.

Attached is my press release to the general public/media, my business letter to the customers, and my JetBlue text anaylsis.
These three documents are compressed into a single pdf file. Enjoy!

Ryan L. Ross