Wow was this was a much tougher assignment than I thought it would be! As a person with an engineering background, I have done my fair share of research, technical reports, and have even made and presented posters just like this on topics related to material strength and welds but something about this made it so much more difficult. If I had to guess why, I would say that it is because it seems thins topic lends itself so much better to a technical report or essay that a poster.
I am comfortable in relating data through graphs but the graphs in this case represent such a small aspect of the story that it was difficult to not flood the page with writing, which I may have unfortunately done. There are so many nuances to the history of literacy and why it was so low before 500 years ago and why it started to improve that I feel this was just not the right topic for me to cover with the poster. On the flip side, it makes me that much more excited for the CPE because I know that everything that I have learned so far about literacy and how that information should be presented aligns perfectly with the format of the CPE.
Another hard aspect to grapple with was sizing. I used PowerPoint as it is quick and intuitive, but the problem I had to confront was what scale is this PowerPoint actually? It made it tricky because many of the examples were fairly easy to read on a computer screen, and that is how we are presenting these so it had to lie somewhere between a full sized printed research poster and the online examples we were provided with. Additionally, I felt that a lot of my poster’s space was taken up by my three graphs. The whole point of the poster is to present this data, and the graphs certainly could not have been made smaller due to the amount of information each presented. Nevertheless, part of me feels pained by just how much space they take up as I feel I could have formatted the poster a bit better with more room.
Finally, the greatest challenge of them all, I was forced to face the soul crushing fact that I am in fact, not a graphic designer in the least. There is a reason why I wear a t-shirt and jeans with boots every day in winter and why deep down I truly am an engineer. I hold on firmly onto whatever is most logical to do, which often is the easy simple design the gets the point home without too much pizazz to get in the way, which is the one area that I did worst in. I most definitely could have doubled the amount of time I spent on this project by making things look prettier, but that’s not really me. I would rather spend that saved time learning more about literacy, reading fascinating articles on the cultural shifts that created literate humans, and finding more information on how technology has advanced literacy. I am much more a researcher and writer than I am a design guru, and for better or worse I enjoy constructing a well-supported argument more than I enjoy dressing up a half-baked one.
Overall, this was a hard assignment not for all the reasons I was worried about, but because of that one unexpected one I never expected. On the bright side, I am even more excited to tackle the CPE and share all the fascinating material I have found in a better-suited format that will hopefully be much more enjoyable for both reader and writer.
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