Communication Design Workshop Assignments

Client Interaction Project

For this assignment you will interview a client. Find someone who is willing to be interivewed for the purposes of assisting you in this assignment. It must be someone who has some sort of communication need. It might be someone who hires communications specialists regularly or someone who has never actually hired a specialist but who has a need. You might want to try a small non-profit agency which has a need but no money to pay a freelancer. Such an agency would probably be undyingly grateful to receive your professional assistance in any capacity.

Make and keep an appointment to interview this client. During the interview you should assess the client's needs for the project he/she has in mind. Discuss all appropriate material and requirements with the client.

For this assignment you will turn in:
1. A pre-interview outline of the questions and topic areas you felt need to be covered. This outline should be written before you conduct the interview.
2. A summary of what took place in the interview. This should cover all the significant points you would need to know if you were proceeding with the campaign.
3. A proposal for an appropriate message campaign. Remember the golden braid.

It is possible that you might want to proceed with designing this message campaign for this client. You may certainly do so and submit it as another assignment for this class.

Print Assignment

For this assignment you are to produce a print piece. You may do this piece either for the client you interviewed for your client interaction, another client, or for an imaginary client. If you cannot imagine a situation which requires you to design a print piece a few suggestions are listed below.

To produce the piece you need to be able to answer for yourself the four major questions we have been learning about. Although the medium of print is assigned, you need to determine what kind of print is going to be the best in your situation. For instance, will this be a flier, a billboard, a poster, a direct mail piece, et cetera.

Design the piece and produce a prototype. This means actually creating the artwork and writing the text. If you do not feel comfortable producing graphics for this piece you may cut our magazine pictures, use photographs, or draw line representations. Using actual illustrations will force you to be specific: for instance if you have a shot of "people" you will need to think about who they are, how many, how are they dressed, in what positions do they appear, etc... Do not make suggestions about what the piece will say or the visuals that will appear -- be specific. Write the text. Provide the illustrations. Lay it out.

You will present your piece to the class

Suggestions:

AIDS Education New Mexico Tourism

Preserving African Wildlife The Enola Gay Exhibit

Research Assignment

Imagine that you have been asked to produce a piece of communication. It could be a brochure, an ad, an informational article, public relations material, a combination of these, or any of a host of other types of messages. Select a topic from the list below and produce a list of materials one would use to research the topic thoroughly. You should use at least three different types of sources and your final list of material should include at least twelve specific research possibilities. Some of the source material you may pick from includes electronic material, bound texts in the library or elsewhere, material procured from government or other agencies, personal interviews with identified expert source persons, journals and/or periodicals, and other appropriate material. You must be specific in the list you produce, do not merely suggest, for example, the World Wide Web-- give actual URLs for the sites you would use. You should probably at least cursorily examine the material you want to list to be certain that it has some research potential. For every item, including any that are impossible to lay your hands on to inspect, be specific in your listing of them.

The List to Choose From

Pearls Drug Resistant Tuberculosis

The City of Kobe The University of Maryland System

Action for the Homeless The Hackey Sack

Cleaning Services

Slide Sound Project

For this project you are to draw story boards for at least two minutes of a slide sound presentation. You may design any purpose for this project, or use any suggestions from previous projects or from class.

Things to remember: Slides are still images, you need to represent each image you use on your story board. There are ways to represent movement with still images should you desire to do this. Be aware of how long you are leaving images on the screen. You need to be attentive to your narration and how it coordinates with your visuals. Test your continuity out at home by reading and timing your project.

Your show may be much longer than two minutes, but I only ask you to complete 120 seconds. If your show is twenty minutes and you hand in two, remember that this is only two minutes of a twenty minute show. Please summarize for me what the remainder of the show will look like.

Remember the golden braid; these parts of your project should be apparent in the project and/or you might want to state them explicitly. Please also remember proper story board format: draw the shot, describe it, say how long it remains, and write any and all sound which accompanies it.

Final Project

For your final project you will design a message campaign and provide an accompanying write up that explains the particulars of its design and implementation. First select a topic area and design three different projects addressing it in different ways.

Use at least two different media. (For example: multimedia, print, and slide/sound.)

Each piece should have a different audience.

Each piece should have a different behavioral objective.

Each piece should also differ in rhetorical purpose.

For instance you might be working for a company which has just designed a new paper towel dispenser. You might produce a slide/sound project to introduce the product to your in-house sales force. You might then do a print piece to send out to distributors describing what this new product does and why they'll want to carry it, your sales force might use this print piece as a supplement to their sales calls. And finally you might design a video piece to play at trade shows. Here are three different media and audiences. While the behavioral objectives and rhetorical purposes may be similar, they are not focused in the same way.

The main point of this part of the final project is to show that you can work with a single subject area using a number of different voices. When you are designing your three projects you must remember your audience and the medium you are working in and all that is implied by the differences.

The second part of this project should be accompanying written material that explains your conceptual thoughts for each piece and how you imagine implementation will be achieved. This means you will need to tell the audience, the rhetorical purpose, the behavioral objective. Please be specific. Specificity will entail a detailed description of the audience, a full explanation of the rhetorical purpose, and actual objectives. (For example, if the behavioral objectives entails answering questions or listing things, what are the questions or listed items you will expect.) As for implementation I ask that you provide an explanation (not simply a list) of what professionals, other than yourself, will be required for you to bring the full campaign to completion. If you will need a photographer, for example, explain what they will be required to do. (A breather for you: You do not need to think about budget for this project.)

You will present your final project to the class.

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