English 350
Visible Rhetoric: The many faces of design
Fall 2006
MWF 2-2:50 408 stv

Jim Kalmbach (kalmbach@ilstu.edu)
421H Stevenson 438-7648, home: 454-8017
http://www.ilstu.edu/~kalmbach
Office Hours: MWF 1-2, after class, and by appointment.
Class web site: http://www.english.ilstu.edu/kalmbach/350/
Class listserv: ENG350-SP05-01-L@ilstu.edu You can manage your subscription here.
Class blogging site: http://eng350.cas.ilstu.edu
Class software: Adobe Creative Suite: Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat. Available from the TechZone for $190. That is a lot of money but it is a a great price. If you are in publishing, you will use this software over and over.

Texts	Web sites	Click to Order
Williams, Robin. (2003). The Non-Designer's Design Book. 5th Edition. Phoenix, Az: Paraglyph. This will be our major text as we learn indesign and work with type, graphics, and space on the page.	Book website Robin Williams
White, Alexander. (2002). Elements of Graphic Design. Allworth Press. When we are done with Williams, we will look at White's take on graphic design.	Book website Review
Schriver, Karen A. (1997). Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers. New York: Wiley. I like to include one "theory" book in each class that provides a framework for looking at what we are doing more deeply. Schriver's book is now almost a decade old, but no one has been able to replace it.	Book website Interview Review

Course Objectives
My objectives for this course are that you learn about design, about type, about color, and about using images. I also want you to learn to see organizational documents like brochures or booklets as deeply social and rhetorical documents and to understand how the visible plays a critical role in their social lives. Finally I want you to be able to thoughtfully critique such documents in the context of their audience and purpose, and to produce, at the end of the semester, an attractive portfolio with a variety of design projects.

Sound like fun?

I am interested in exploring with you a group of interrelated issues: First and foremost the social nature of publications. The idea that they are artifacts in use and their audience and purpose define their appearance and effectiveness. I am also interested in the interrelationship of words and images and about the ways that we can create new kinds of writing with type, text, and images.

Course Requirements

• Responding to Readings, and Posting Questions (10%)
  
  1. You will write a reflective response to each of the assignment readings in the class. I expect that you will post these responses to your blog, but I will accept responses in other forms. I am looking for responses that engage with the ideas in the text and not ones that summarize the reading or dismiss it (it was great or it sucked). Your responses can be visual or aural (you can even podcast your response), though I expect most people will write their responses because writing is what is comfortable to most of us.
  2. In addition to writing a response for each writing, you will write a set of discussion questions for one of the reading assignments for our theory book. I will assemble the questions into a handout and put you in small groups to talk about them. Your goal is to write questions that will stimulate discussion. Give the questions a good deal of thought, you do not want to get stuck in a boring discussion caused by your own questions. When you write discussion questions, those questions count as your response.
     
• Attendance , Participation, and Peer Review 10%
  Includes participation in a variety of in-class projects. We will also use our course blog to manage the peer review process for our various projects.
  
• Class projects and Portfolio (You will write a reflection for each project.) 60%

  Project 1 Design on a Page.
  One of the fundamental aspects of design is the page: a single unit of content that is perceived as a whole. That page may be a flyer, a panel in a brochure, a page in a book, a screen. If you learn how to manage the visible rhetoric of designing a single, self-contained page, you will use that knowledge over and over in an amazing array of projects. So our first project will be constructing a page; in this case, we will use a flyer. You will pick a flyer from campus, write a critique, then redesign the flyer in indesign.

  Project 2: Design Across Software
  In this class, we use indesign, the most powerful and flexible desktop publishing program out there. It is becoming increasingly widespread but what do you do if you get a job and discover that all your employer has is MS Word? Do you give up everything you have learned about typography, space, consistency and contrast and just pour your information into a template and forget it? No! You find a way to make the software work for you instead of against you. This project is about adapting what you have learned about design to different software. In this project, you will start with a one page document you have created in indesign (I assume you will use your flyer from project 1, but you do not have to) you will then create alternative versions of that Flyer in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher  (or some other odd ball template driven DTP program for the masses) and write a reflection about the impact of these different software packages on your project.

  Project 3: Design Across the Fold
  You will pick a brochure that you think has the wrong number of folds: too many or too few. You will then redesign the brochure with a new information architecture. I find the affordances of the fold and the way content breaks across that fold to be fascinating. This project will enable us to study the rhetoric of brochures without getting bogged down in production issues.

  Project 4: Design Across Pages
  This project will focus on design issues when you combine pages into a single document. Your project will be to create any sort of multi-page document: a chapbook, a newsletter, a children’s book; the field is open as long as a staple or some other form of binding is involved. This project must be new. It can't be a redesign. We are transitioning from redesigning existing documents to creating your own documents.

  Project 5 : Design for a Real World Client
  For your final project in this class, you produce a document (or a group of documents) for a real world client (the client can be yourself, but I prefer it when the client is someone else), As part of this project, you develop a plan and a budget for printing and distributing your project and write a memo presenting your publication(s) and your print and distribution plans to the client.

  Project Six: Portfolio
  You will construct a design portfolio of your projects from our class and turn that portfolio in at the end of the semester.

• Three Publication Critiques 20%
  These critiques will be coordinated with various class design projects.

Graduate Students will do an additional project. They can negotiate this project depending on the nature of their program and their progress to degree. It can be some additional reading or bibliographic work plus a reflection on that reading, a paper on any aspect of visible rhetoric, or an additional publication project.

Grading
My philosophy is grade minor projects like your critiques so you don't obsess over them, but to not grade the major publication projects and instead to encourage revision. Students can make dramatic grow over the course of a semester, and I am interested in where you end up not where you begin.

The consequence of this policy is that you may not know how you are doing in the class. I encourage you to come in to talk to me (with projects in hand) if you get nervous about your grade. When deciding final grades, I look to make sure you have done all the inclass activities, reading responses, etc. I then look at how much you have improved over the semester. I am particularly interested in the quality of your multi page project, final project and portfolio and less concerned about the first three projects. I am much more interested in where you end up in the class, not where you begin.