Summary of chapter 15 of visual design solutions

  As the combination of images and words, visual storytelling takes an important role on conveying narrative stories to evoke viewers’ emotions or arouse their curiosities about some particular topics.

  In many people’s view, narrative stories are just for children or teenagers who are interested in dramatic stories like comics which provide a sequence of events and stimulate their interests on continual reading to till the final result. Actually, narrative stories are indeed appropriate for adults as well to facilitate read a chunk story and provide a common understanding which can be interpreted by their own experiences.

  Normally, a narration includes a trigger problem or event, elaborations for the problem and the final problem solving. “This type of sequence is a comfortable and familiar approach to storytelling.” (page 287) In this case, a visual storytelling can really benefit for expressing talent ideas or oriented persuading by depicting sequential events around a specific topic or showing what the characters are saying and thinking in particular situations to arouse sympathy.

  For learning, visual storytelling can make the story more meaningful by implementing creative and effective illustrations or photographic. Designers can use realistic drawings to enhance visual appealing and cartoon illustrations to exaggerate some features of particular characters or hot events in a humorous way and even stock photos to express varied gestures and emotions clearly.

  To reinforce expression deeply, designers can also choose a photo album which includes a series of customized photos around a same topic. Professionally, designers can use photo essay which places captions blow each photo to help viewers quickly get the key point for understanding when illustrating an educational concept or scientific issue.

  For designing a narrative story, we always divide the chunk story into several panels in intended sequence like a comic to make it easier for reading and understanding. Because of our physiological and cognitive mechanism, we usually perceive objects from left to right and top to bottom. So it’s necessary to arrange panels in this way to suit for our visual convention and guide viewers’ visual sequence.

  “Each panel or frame usually represent a moment in time, but it can also represent different views or places where the action is happening simultaneously.” (page 294) In this case, we need pay attention to the continuity of panels by choosing appropriate texts and images to avoid disorienting the meaning of the story and we also need know control the pace formed by gutters which may influence the influence viewers’ initiative on keeping attention.

  To make panels more vivid and interesting for engaging viewers and catch their attraction, we can integrate diverse types of word or speech balloons and pictorial devices into our panel design. For example, we can use word balloons with dashed lines as the background of whispering and balloons with a cloud shape as the background of thinking besides the characters. In addition, we can utilize action lines for movement and heart shapes between characters to show their love and concentric curved lines to represent noise or sound.

  Although it’s a little difficult to implement camera shots and angels to enhance expression of panels, we can still try it when needed because sometimes they can really help convey ideas and emotions efficiently. For instance, we can use close-up shot to emphasize a part of objects or human bodies to establish a prominent view and usually it’s a good idea to convey admiration for someone from worm’s-eye view.

Reflection of chapter 4 of canvas design

  As a part of the experiment of canvas practicing, I have received and accepted all the invitation of other three courses established by Sunny, Angela and Sam as a student. The canvas system sent me the invitation email to my registered email address automatically when they clicked the “invite” button in people module.

  Different from people module which utilizes external email service to communicate with others, inbox module provides an internal way for communication in canvas system around teachers and students or other participants. I can compose a new message to particular audience who are belonging to different discussion groups in different courses and I can also receive messages from others in courses I’m involved in.

  I can customize each conversation as unread and starred to highlight it for later reading or archived important conversation for later recalling. Absolutely, I can filter different types of marked conversations from all by choosing different sorts listed in diverse drop-down menu.

  Similar with inbox module, announcements module is another effective way to establish a conversation between teachers and students that teachers can create an announcement for his or her course to remind something important or interesting for students to pay attention. As the establisher, teachers can decide if the announcement could be commented and if comments from others could be shown for students who didn’t make a reply before. If teachers make it available for comment, then students can reply the announcement in the special area for comments as a feedback for it.

  As the very important part of academic feedback, students’ grades of different course always need to be sent back to them immediately to let them know their performing in past learning decades. Absolutely, teachers can mute some assignments to hide students’ grades temporarily till the course ending to avoid decreasing their learning interests if they didn’t do well on previous work, but it means that students won’t be allowed to submit comments for assignments and teachers cannot change grade or curve assignments and send relative notifications unless they unmute them.

  There are also many diverse options for teachers to choose according to their purpose in pop-off menus inside the course name and beside the “export” button. For example, teachers can view students’ assignments and give points there directly from “SpeedGrade” page, they can also download students’ assignments as Microsoft Word format and re-upload a new submission which contains their modifying suggestions for specific areas in students’ assignments by marking some sentences which need modify or delete or others. Because I didn’t modify the beginning time of my AR course, I don’t have a chance to see how this grade module works authentically till Mar. 1^st. I’m sorry about that. You know I have set my grading scale in syllabus before without serious consideration. But this grades module provides a practical grading scale for teachers automatically when they type in grades for different assignments, I searched the specific level by trying different points in grading system and finally I figured the grading level of system and modified my previous grading scale according to it.

  Though I also didn’t have a chance to experience the real conference in canvas, I think it’s a really powerful function for online course that teachers can teach class like in real classroom. Teachers can create a conference and set different duration for it depending on their actual purpose, then students can join the conference synchronously with teachers.

  In the new page of online conference, teachers can share his or her webcam, microphone or computer screen to facilitate communication with students and even shoot the video of conference by click shooting button in the right left corner. The name and status of teachers and students will displayed in the user area and teachers can decide the audio input from students by alternatively mute their microphones by clicking dedicated button. For presentation based course, teachers can upload the presentation to the default area and make some marks on it to illustrate their points in the process of conference. Besides audio communication, teachers and students can also type in characters in the chat area and the text contents can be recorded automatically for later reviewing. Canvas provides seven diverse models for online conference by emphasizing different areas so that teachers can choose which to use according to their real needs.

  In my opinion, communication is the spirit of learning and teaching. As you can see, the modules I mentioned above can really make this process as efficient and convenient as traditional class communication or better. I really appreciate this.

Reflection of class on Feb 16^th

  To enhance the meaning of content in a visual design, the author proposed four diverse ways to achieve this which include cultural conventions, visual metaphors, breaking down the complex contents and visualized diagrams. In the end, he mentioned the semantic coherence that we need ensure that all aspects of visual representation are aligned with their intended meaning.

  Just as he talked about the wrong example of food guide pyramid in figure 14.18 which lacked semantic cohesion in sequence of importance, I think his content arrangement of this chapter also has similar issue that he separated the semantic coherence from other four segments.

  In my opinion, the semantic coherence is the most important part of this chapter about enhancing content meaning because the four ways he suggests won’t work as expected at all if designers attached an unmatched color or unintended diagram to his contents. And it’s not a particular application in visual design that many designers often attach offensive or unrelated images, icons or diagrams to their contents to generate a misunderstanding imperceptibly.

  It’s a constructive suggestion for his writing instead of strict blame that I think it would be better if he could integrate semantic coherence into diverse practical ways for enhancing meaning or mention it at first to form a prominent impression on viewers to emphasize the importance of semantic coherence in visual design.