Logo created by SW on flaming text[/caption]"We need to understand the importance of graphics, music, and cinema, which are just as powerful and in some ways more deeply intertwined with young people's culture." (George Lucas on Edutopia).
Lucas recognises of course that literacy and numeracy are important skills too; his point is that we are neglecting other fundamental means of communication. Just as language has a grammar which can be learned, so do visual ways of getting a message across. Yet our culture, which arbitrarily elevates some forms of expression such as literature and science, does not value as highly a literacy of visual communication.
"There is grammar in film, there is grammar in graphics, there is grammar in music, just like there are rules in math that can be taught. For instance, what emotion does the color red convey? What about blue? What does a straight line mean? How about a diagonal line?" (Lucas again)
I was reading for this post, immersed in ideas of visual literacy, typographical hierarchy and informivorous humans, when an email from a colleague pinged onto my screen asking me to:
"teach a short lesson on graphic design: use of color, placement, streamlining the final product…."
I've been asked this before and have squirmed because I don't feel particularly qualified to do it. The principles of design have not been a part of my education (which would not surprise George Lucas). I appreciate good design when it is pointed out to me, but I am in awe of those people who are capable of communicating beautifully (in my experience, the great majority is not capable, even some of those preaching about it).
Increasingly, my teaching colleagues allow their students to express their ideas in more visual forms than just essays, such as infographics. As with many of their PowerPoints and posters, however, students do not always maximise the graphical potential of the medium. And as teachers, we often do not provide the best examples with our text-dense slideshows, (not to mention our copyright-busting use of images).
So, in the time-honoured tradition of teachers remaining one step ahead of their students, I will prepare an online slideshow both explaining and demonstrating the principles of good design (to be taught tomorrow!).
My first piece of advice to the students will be to organise their work in three stages:
Research it > Plan it > Create it
Obviously, I must do that too. Researching, I selected four good sources of advice and extracted the main points. I also added a few ideas of my own.
In the Plan It stage, which I shall also require of the students, we organise the information. At this stage, what was a chaotic melée of data starts its transformation to a visual presentation. This brilliant image is one I shall share with the students, but it's not clear that I'm allowed to reproduce it here even with attribution. In the planning stage, I organised the information under headings which logically express my understanding. Once I knew what points I wanted to make, I sought out images which told the same story. This slideshow is what my slides looked like when I had organised the data and sought out some visual examples to make my points.
And finally, my Creation ...
I am not a professional designer (evidently), but the advent of desktop publishing and its descendants have introduced an expectation of production values even for the amateur. We have an obligation to employ the principles ourselves and to pass them on to our students. Furthermore (and I have experienced resistance from colleagues in this regard), our evaluation of student work should extend beyond the content and recognise skillful use of the medium. A project poster is not just a colourful essay. It must communicate visually, as well as textually. We must teach our students to parse the visual grammar of a presentation, not just its words. And we need a good rubric for that, but I haven't been able to find one yet.
The presentation, as you see it above, is my attempt, from a position of relative ignorance, to communicate ideas of visual literacy to our teachers and students.
How would you go about it?
How can I improve my message?
