EDLD+5366+-+Week+Five+-+Course+Reflection

As a high school student, I got my first taste of digital graphics and of desktop publishing in high school journalism. Macs (the old beige units that were monitor and cpu in one box) were just coming into widespread use and we were fortunate enough to have just purchased three of them at the beginning of my junior year. The ability to create, hands-on, what was going to come “off the press” was a formidable one … but with it came great responsibility. Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity were the parameters within which we found ourselves working. It was entirely too easy to use those tools with their seemingly limitless possibilities to exceed our parameters and create a literal piece of crap. It took some time and training to understand the building blocks with which we were working and the restraint it would require to do so effectively.

Fast forward 19 years to this class where suddenly I was faced with the same challenges. The same terms – the memories of trying to edit and/or reconstruct entire pages of a newspaper where an overzealous op/ed editor had used 23 different fonts on one page … It all came flooding back.

Fortunately, through these assignments, I was quickly able to review what I knew and refine it. From the first week's analysis of different publications and their use of C.R.A.P. to the creation of my own business card and logo, the lectures and reading made the pieces fit together in a more sensible way than they had before. By the end, I felt that my more mature eye for design AND what I had learned in this course had me better prepared to use these tools. This has manifested itself already in a great many documents within the athletic department where I work. I am in the process of designing (or redesigning) most of what we use so that it is functional, but also sound in terms of the design principles studied here – the theory being (particularly in the literature we send to possible recruiters) that better, cleaner, more effective design will benefit us and our student-athletes down the road. More attention will be paid to our students because their information is attractive and easy to access than will be paid to those whose information is cluttered and poorly designed.

This class, and the collaborations within, have provided that immediate benefit. However, I also find myself looking at ways that my learning can benefit me as a teacher AND looking at how I can help other teachers on my campus. Finding ways to use this to benefit our students both now and in the future remains the challenge – however, I knew the other day when 2 junior college recruiting coordinators visited with me about helping to redesign their recruiting information sheets, that we must somehow be on the right track with all this C.R.A.P.