Presentation of Design Solutions
With the close of month 11 I am now one step closer to the end of my Mastery Journey in Media Design! This month’s challenge was to develop a website that displayed my past course work as well as a review of the “Stories that Move Mountains: Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations by Martin Sykes, A. Nicklas Malik, and Mark D. West. Apart from completing the required and typical work load of writing a 1000 to 1500 word essay about some other designer’s experience with finding design solutions, inspiration, and or communicating with clients, the real challenge for me was to find a creative and interesting way to redisplay that same work that I’ve been working on for the previous 11 months of this journey. Granted that the last three months were spent making edits and updates to previous work based on feedback from peers and professors. I found myself growing uninterested in the examples of previous student works that all seemed to look the exact same with no real intrigue. And then I happened upon a story from our assigned reading that demonstrated “how a good idea can be killed by poor communication and how tenaciously people can fight to reject a good idea”. The moral of the story concluded that “all new ideas, large or small, meet with some level of resistance, especially if the new idea requires new behavior” (Skyes et al, 2013).
When designing my site my goal was to show my work different from the previous collage styled displays that I had seen from previous submissions so that I could showcase my unique view of things. I understood that while given certain limitations based on a rubric guideline that some things were going to unfortunately feel like carbon copies of previous submissions no matter what. However, there were some places where certain liberties could be taken with the arrangements and selections of work chosen to speak to the core achievements each person should have gleaned from this month’s work. Furthermore, as I had previously spent time redesigning my Behance site which, was the initial place where monthly submissions of my work for each course had been displayed throughout this journey, I found that a lot of what was asked for this month had already been done.
In the redesign I removed weaker work in exchange for showcasing my best work with better descriptions and details that provided more insight into what I was working and or had worked on and I didn’t want to waste time repeating that exact same thing in my website. The only problem was that after my first submission, some feedback that I got from my professor seemed to ask for exactly that. However keeping with my goal to express myself through the presentation of my work I decided to hold fast to the direction that I was headed in. I was very proud of my work and even provided and explanation as to why. After receiving feedback from my classmates to do things like fix grammar errors (which of course everyone should definitely do and I did do) other things like listing the types of software previously used and quoting from subjects learned previously, I found this already completed either on my Behance site or throughout my previous journal submissions which, were both already linked to the website. Thus there was no need to repeat the same information over and over again for fear of losing the engagement of my audience, in addition to writing long form 250 word excerpts to describe or provide an overview for my work that I could say in 100 words or less. I am not a person who likes to read novels on a persons web page.
There was also a suggestion to include the source of my inspiration or creativity for my work as related to the readings, however for a large part of my work outside of what I quoted, the readings did not really inspire my creativity especially for things where I mainly considered the problem at hand and arrived at solutions that did not follow the typical brainstorming path of thought. This of course resulted in my work standing out and being recognized as interesting and different, which made me happy because I do not always think in a straight line or text book guided fashion, but this also resulted in my not being able to comply with expected formulated results that could be attributed solely 100% to course material. I tend to engage more with images, video, and interesting short copy, so I wrote and designed my site for my ideal audience. This more than likely will have cost me some serious points off the rubric. Yet, in any case the most important take away is not to just merely submit things for grades as grades do not matter to a viewing audience if the work submitted does not speak to your creativity. Therefore in addition to this, three more takeaways that I shall apply from this course toward my future work for visual presentations are that you must free your mind, you have to take a much different approach, and people absorb stories visually.
Sykes, M., Malik, A. & West, M. (2013). Stories that move mountains: Storytelling and visual design for persuasive presentations. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Retrieved May 6, 2017 from Safaribooksonline