TO: Dr. Davis
FROM: Crawford Moore
RE: Digital Media Literacy Illustration Reflection and Rationale
DATE: 19 September 2016
When deciding on the design for my illustration I searched through images of other infographics online and on Reddit. I knew I wanted to include images of the popular social media sites like Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Including these images gave my illustration some character and made it more interesting than an image with only text and graphs. The other infographics I found online were designed in a way that easily transitioned the reader from section to section without breaking the flow of the illustration. One difficulty I encountered was making the graphs and statistics interesting. I overcame this obstacle by color-coding my graphs with the corresponding color of the social media site. For example, on my first page, I made the Snapchat bar yellow, the Facebook bar blue, and the Instagram bar orange.
The audience for my illustration is undergraduate students so I tailored my illustration to specifically address this audience. By including well-known social media platforms, I was able to tailor my design to the intended audience. One challenge of designing an illustration for this specific audience was my knowing that there is both an intended and unintended audience. I wanted to design my illustration in a way that would connect with the intended views, undergraduate students, and unintended views, anyone else who may encounter my illustration.
The feedback I received from you and other students influenced my final design. One piece of feedback I received was the three sentences I had discussing the benefit of using social media in education were just thrown into my illustration in a way that interrupted the flow. In response, I placed each of the three sentences in into a text box and placed them in a vertical line under the Benefits of Social Media in Education section.
