Week 2 Assessment – Self Critique and the Design Process – Excelsior Writers | excelsiorwriters.com
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Week 2 Assessment – Self Critique and the Design Process
Learning Objectives Covered
- LO 03.03 – Analyze design principle usage in personal project creation
Career Relevancy
When you are working as a professional designer, you will often have to present your work to clients. This presentation will most likely outline your own design choices, especially how you have used design elements and principles to capture your client’s message and share it with their unique audience. Preparing a presentation also allows professional designers to analyze the design piece with a critical eye. Analyzing the principles before sending a piece off to a client for approval could result in fewer revision requests from the client because you have already looked at it with a critical eye and researched all scenarios to ensure you have chosen the best one.
Background
If you are working with a remote client (meaning you and your client are not in the same city or town) this presentation often happens in writing over email. This means that your ability to write about your own design choices is key to your success as a designer. If you can write clearly about your work as a designer, you are much more likely to be seen as a trustworthy professional. This will lead to repeat clients and a thriving business. On the other hand, if you are unable to write clearly about your work you will most likely confuse your clients which can, in turn, lead them to question your ability as a designer and hinder your chances of being hired to work with them on another project
When writing about your design choices, it is important to show that your work is appropriate to the situation. Saying that it is pretty, cool, or you did something because you like it will not work in a client presentation. Instead, you will need to give the specific reason you made the choice that you did based on the principles of design, audience needs, content, etc.
The following scheme can be helpful to follow when writing a design analysis:
- Introduction Paragraph – Briefly introduce the design problem, what you needed to make, and any audience considerations.
- Body Paragraph(s) – Go into detail about your design. This includes outlining how you are using each design principle and why you made certain decisions regarding the layout, color scheme, and font choice. Always tie these choices back to concrete project elements rather than personal emotions or feelings.
- Conclusion Paragraph – Remind your client of the design problem from the introduction. Then, summarize your design decisions, stressing again how your design decisions solve the design problem at hand.
Prompt
Through a written self-critique, this assessment will assess your ability to reflect and write about the project you have created for Assignment 2. For this assessment, you will be writing specifically about how you have used the principles of design in the advertisement you created for Assignment 2.
In your paper, first, provide a short summary of the design challenge. Next, outline which design principles you used within the ad. Then, overview why you chose the principles that you did. Analyze and describe how each principle is making your piece stronger overall. Finally, provide a brief summary recapping the design challenge and how your solution best fits the requirements.
Your paper will need to be a minimum of 650 words. If you need a reminder of the design principles, please refer to Discussion 2 as well as the Course Materials.
*Note: If you were unable to complete Week 2’s Assignment, please choose an ad from this folder to analyze.This option is ONLY if you choose not to turn in this week’s assignment. If you are turning in this week’s assignment, you must analyze the ad you created.
Assignment Instructions:
- Use Microsoft Word to write your paper
- Briefly introduce the project
- Describe elements used in the composition
- Describe principles used in the composition
- Overview of why you chose to use the elements and principles that you did
- Describe how each element and principle is making your piece stronger overall
- Conclude with a summary paragraph showing how your design addresses the overall design challenge
- Compose your paper using InDesign on a letter-sized page
- Place your Ad on the second page of your document so your instructor can refer to it while reading your analysis (note: you may want to create your paper in Microsoft Word to take advantage of spelling and grammar features and then copy and paste it into InDesign)
- Your paper will need to be 650 words minimum
Submission Requirements:
- Save your file as DES109_Assessment2_FirstLast.indd (Native InDesign file)
- Export your document to a PDF (It will be automatically named DES109_Assessment2_FirstLast.pdf if you named your InDesign file correctly)
- Submit your PDF document for grading
Best Practices: Always keep all of your native and working files you used to create a project. You will need these when you reach your Portfolio or Capstone course. Continue with this best practice because a client may want to reprint and make changes on an existing project at a later time.
The files below are PDFs showing A-level work by fellow students. The examples are provided to illustrate the quality of work needed to get an A on this task. Copying from the samples is considered cheating. Use the examples to inform your plan to create your own work. Look at the first two pieces below for writing quality, ability to meet the goals of the task, and overall flow and cohesion.
The third file is the pdf I did and I want you to use for reference.
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