Design Analysis
Paper IV will ask you to consider not just the content of your argument, but also its form. You will need to format your blog post to meet the expectations of your audience, and to make use of the specific conventions of online writing. You will also need to analyze the design choices you make in your blog post. To prepare for this aspect of your paper, you will write a short design analysis of a website or blog that you see as a potential model for your design in Paper IV.
Choose a website
Choose a website or blog whose design you find attractive and rhetorically effective. You might choose a website that one of the group-led discussion readings is drawn from. You might even have a website in mind that you think would be a good audience for your Paper IV blog post. Pick a single page from that website. Ideally, this should be a page that displays content similar to what you will be writing for Paper IV (so, a blog post or article rather than an “About” page or a main landing page).
Once you have chosen a website and a page, write a 500-750 word analysis of the page’s design. Your analysis should accomplish the following tasks:
Describe the page
Provide your reader with a concise but thorough description of the webpage. Assume that your reader does not have the page in front of them, and must thus rely solely on your description. Since you will not be able to describe every single detail, you should first identify what the most important aspects of the web page are and describe them. You might consider the following elements:
- Colors
- Fonts and text
- Images
- Layout
- Visual hierarchy
- Use of space
Identify what is most successful
Identify the two most successful elements of the page’s design. What do they accomplish? Why are they successful? Provide concrete examples from the website and information from the course readings to support your claims.
Identify what is least successful
Identify what you see as the weakest aspect of the page’s design. What is it intended to accomplish? Why does it fail to accomplish its goal? What design change might improve this aspect? Provide concrete examples from the website and information from the course readings to support your claims.
Who your analysis should address
Your audience for your design analysis is a classmate who is familiar with our discussions about design but has not seen the specific page you are analyzing. The classmate remembers the course readings about design and visual rhetoric, but might need brief reminders about who said what.
What your design analysis should do
- Identify and analyze a single, specific webpage.
- Describe that page in a way that prioritizes the most significant design elements and communicates them to a reader unfamiliar with the page.
- Analyze the most and least successful aspects of the page’s design, providing specific evidence drawn from the page to support each claim, and connecting that evidence to the course readings.
- Identify and link to the webpage at the beginning of the paper and cite or link to any sources referenced (depending on whether the source is online or in print).
Submission Instructions
You should upload your analysis to the “Design Analysis” folder on Sakai by class time on Wednesday, March 22.
Grading
Your design analysis is worth 3 points. Although you may revise your analysis, your time will probably be better spent using the comments to help you write your meta-analysis for Paper IV.