My PowerPoint Presentation

My Presentation to the class today was based on two readings by R. C PArker and an online article by Jacci Howard Bear;

Parker, RC, 1990, ‘Beginning observations’, Looking good in print: a guide to basic design for desktop publishing, 2nd edn, Ventara Press, Chapel Hill NC, Chapter 1, pp.1-22.

Parker, RC, 2003, ‘Designing documents for web distribution’, Looking good in print, 5th edn, Paraglyph Press, Scottsdale AZ, Chapter 14, pp. 269-293

Bear, JH, Elements of design, About.com
<http://desktoppub.about.com/od/elements/tp/Elements_of_Design.htm>

My presenation illustrated and compared both of the theorists ideas about graphic design. I covered most of the basic information and key ideas that these theorists suggested as well as rerferring back to 'real life' examples and places where these ideas could be used.

I explained that 'There are no universal rules to graphic design but successful design evolves from a mindset.' (Parker, 1990) and that if there were universal guidelines and rules set out that had to be abided by, that there would be no need for creativity and designers would have no place in this world. I explained that if there were set 'rules', creativity would simply be replaced by software and all comunication documents would be computed generated and would look the same.

I then explained that good designs stemmed from good planning and good planning means understanding the purpose and importance of the information you are communicating. Planning involves looking at;

-Who is the intended audience?
-What is the message you are communicating?
-In what format will your readers receive the message?
-What other messages have they encoutered?

I gave the example of a healthcare report intended for a Government organisation versus a poster for a childrens book launch. These would be TOTALLY different documents and would require completely different basic planning right from teh beginning.

I also explained the importance of experimentation and the idea of analyzing other designers work and collecting a scrapbook of design ideas. These ideas can be used as inspiration for future designs and also to highlight design faults and things you do not like or think work well as guides for what to avoid doing.

Apperance was also a major point of my presentation, I talked about basic design formats and ideas, including;

-Headings
-Fonts
-Lines
-Images
-Consistency

And how these elements can be used to a designers advantage to highlight specific important information.

I also referred to this quote:
“As a general rule, always design for the worst possible circumstances.”
-R. C. Parker 2003

and elaborated on the fact that a designer should plan for the worst case scenario when it come to online publishing. The designer can not assume anything! They must assume the worst about the viewer of the document and also the screen the person is viewing the content of your design on. They might be viewing it from a blackberry for all you know!

I explained that viewing from a computer screen is more difficult than from a hard copy piece of paper and picked up a pice of paper and showed them this. Hard copy information can generally be viewed as a whole vertical document, online however, only a small part of the document can be viewed at a time. I also mentioned a few other things to take into consideration when publishing to the web:

-Avoid multicolumn layouts.
-Wider line spacing.
-Paragraph Spacing instead of indents.
-White space.
-Typefaces and Sizes. Avoid ornate.
-Colour- Single colour V rainbow.
-Inform readers- Page numbers.



I think that I tought my presentation group some valuable information. They seemed to agree with most of what I was teaching them and for the most part could relate to the examples I gave them and explained. I simplified the theories of both Parker and Bear as much as possible to make my presentation understandable and easy to follow.