Bookmark / Web Site Project

Our campus is awash with flyers, posters, handouts, and forms--given out from offices, scattered on display tables, and lining the hallways. These documents earnestly provide information about programs, clubs, happenings, products, etc., but utlimately the information gets lost under the sheer bulk of paper, which we must file, tuck, fold, stack, save, toss and then look for later.

Adopt one of these unloved flyers/posters and approach its task with a new strategy. Create an attractive bookmark that publicizes what the flyer/poster once offered in an attractive and useful format, and that provides a Web address. Then create a companion Web page (or site) for that Web address where complete and up-to-date information can be found.

Use design elements on both the bookmark and Web page(s) to give the whole project a coherent look and feel.

An Alternative

Perhaps a book mark isn't a print object that your audience would value and keep. If so, think of another: a coaster, for instance. The point is to create a document that is also a useful thing that your audience is likely to keep (and, with it, your message and URL).

The Creative Challenges:

• Bookmark as Object: Your bookmark should have two sides: a pictorial side and a more typographic side. The pictorial side is important to making the bookmark a pleasing object to keep and use. The typographic side should provide essential information written and designed according to the Robin Williams' principles of design and typography. Of course, the bookmark needs to include a URL to a Web site with more information. I will give you some suggestions about creating a book mark in PageMaker.
• landing place and flow: The bookmark and Web site should use what you learned in the Revision of Ad project about providing a natural "landing place" for the eye and then a sense of flow from the pictorial side of the bookmark, onto and through the back (look for opportunities to use the principle of repetition!), and then onto and down the Web pages.
• rhetoric: Design the bookmark and Web site with the audience in mind: their tastes, values, sense of identity, etc. The creative challenges of design should be made within the parameters of what you know about the audience.
• iconcology : both the bookmark and the Web site should clearly be a "package," designed with similar images, colors, typefaces, visual themes, etc. to connect them. Think of the book mark as a little piece of the Web site that broke off and drifted into the phyiscal world.
• Web-page and -site design: The Web page should provide complete and updated information for the audience and in support of the client. The page should include text, images, a link menu if you have secondary pages in the site, and links to external sites of related interest to the audience. The Web pages should be compact and attractive with a minimum of scrolling required. I will provide you more on Web design elsewhere.

Submitting the Assignment's Elements

• Post the Web page/site to a folder on the server: www/5220/bookmark
• Post a JPEG of your book mark (both sides) to the same folder. I'll show you how to create the jpeg from PageMaker. This will allow me to see the color of your book mark without your having to go to the expense of printing out in color.
• Print out a black-and-white copy of the book mark and Web site/page and hand it in to me with annotations.
• Send a message to a Webx folder discussion "Bookmark URLs" with a URL for both the Web page/site and the jpeg of your book mark (front and back).