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The following tutorial helps you to develop a three-fold brochure to
be printed on two sides of standard paper and folded in "barrel
format" to present to people for informational purposes. The tutorial
assumes that you will be working together as a group, but it can be
adapted for individual projects.
The focus of this group brochure project is to get you thinking right
away about information design by doing some hands-on experimenting.
There is no "right answer" to any of these projects, and we
hope that groups will try to develop the most innovative ways of designing
information. As with any group project, you are only as strong as the
weakest member of your group. Do your best to work together and to listen
to people's ideas. Someone will eventually need to take charge of the
planning and two others (one for each page) will take charge of the
actual typing of the information. If someone in your group is especially
skilled in working with Word, she or he might want to oversee the design
process. You should each try to assume individual tasks while offering
input wherever you can be helpful. Your instructor will probably ask
you later to evaluate the work of each person in your group so as to
assign credit proportionately.
The Assignment
The basic assignment is for you to imagine that our Information Design
Class (IDC) has just received a contract to design one of the following
items. To make sure we test as many options as possible, we are going
to break up into several teams, each of whom will have to develop their
own vision of the project design. The overall groups will review these
designs at the end of the assigned work period (generally two class
periods) and then vote on which to present to the client. Here are the scenarios:
- Needing a guide to Info Design resources, Rutgers Libraries hired a web designer, who was promptly axed after showing more interest in redevising color schemes than providing quality info. Now they've hired you. Since the Libraries' web profile is set, what they need most is content: a catalog of Info Design resources, especially websites and print sources, all briefly summarized and organized into user-friendly categories. They also want you to design a matching set of brochures aimed at Info Design subfields like human-centered design and usability — or at likely user-groups such as statistics profs or IT students.
In response, each team will produce both a resource catalog and a brochure set. Any aspect of Info Design that might be of interest to the Libraries' users should be covered — except web design, which is getting separate treatment. While the resource catalog requires no visual design since it will fit into the Libraries' current site, the brochure design is left to your discretion within the following parameters:
- employ the Libraries' current branding;
- project a trustworthy, library-like tone, though possibly including material students would perceive as fun or exciting;
- list general Info Design resources;
- give a brief tutorial on using the Libraries site to search for Info Design resources;
- give detail pertinent to the targeted subfield (topic or user-group) at which each brochure aims.
More details...
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The Rutgers
University Computer Services (RUCS) distributes a twelve page
booklet to students each year titled "Students' Guide to Computing
Services at Rutgers." The guide is expensive to produce and
covers all of the Rutgers campuses (including Camden, Newark, and
New Brunswick). In this age of budget cuts, RUCS has decided to
scale down their guide and to have each campus computing service
produce its own guide in a three-fold brochure. Your job is to design
the brochure for New
Brunswick Computing Services (NBCS) to describe the computing
services at the New
Brunswick area campuses, including Busch, College Avenue, Cook,
Douglass, and Livingston. You should review the original booklet
and look at the web site for more information. The guide is especially
intended to serve first year and transfer students who may not be
very familiar with computers.
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The bus service at Rutgers University wants to redesign their schedule
information. Currently, information about the buses is available
in one of two ways: a miniature handout with little visual information
and a much larger map of the various campuses with lots of information
on things other than buses. The small version is easy to carry around
and look at while waiting for the bus, but it has very little information.
The large one has lots of information, but it's not the type of
thing you want to be opening up while walking around -- especially
on a windy day. Your job is to design something somewhere in between
these two options that works as a three-fold brochure: a little
more visual information than the little schedule but much handier
than the big map. The company wants some sort of visual representation
(such as a map) to be included in the brochure, and they want to
project a friendly image to students.
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The Rutgers Libraries want to design a brochure that can be given
to students who are new to doing research when they first enter
the library. It should guide them through the very basics of doing
research at the library. It could be written for a specific campus
library or for all of the libraries. It can offer information on
the brochure or link to online information that the student can
access at the computer terminals. What it should cover is the process
of using IRIS to find a book and the process of locating a journal
article on a specific subject and then finding that journal and
xeroxing pages from it. The library would like to use its own Rutgers
Libraries web site and The
Knowledge Maze tutorial as guides for developing this brochure.
Your instructor will assign you one of these projects or may develop
a new one for the class.
Next Step --> Once you have your assignment, you will be
ready to start Planning Your Document.
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