Visual Design Reflection

A majority of technical writing/reports rely heavily on the visual layout and the design. Visual layout and design is an area of my writing that greatly improved as the semester progressed. At the beginning of the semester visual layout and design was not a major point of emphasis in my writing, however, as the semester progressed, I began to consider visual design more and more. This progression helped me to make three visually appealing artifacts that subsequently helped improve each artifact individually. My conscious inclusion of visual design in my writing helped to make the presentation cleaner and easier to follow as well as helping to improve upon the visual aspect of WOVEN. English 1102 and English 1101 both focus on the concept …show more content…
However, as the semester progressed, I began to realize that the design of the presentation could greatly increase of the effectiveness of the presentation as well as peak the interest of the audience in a way that a generic slideshow can not. This realization came during the creation of the proposal of the group project on XO Orpheus. In my proposal I created a presentation with a generic background that neither supported or contradicted the ideas that were being addressed and was mostly superfluous, and this detracted from the overall effectiveness of the proposal as a whole. However, after meeting with my group and looking into the visual design I was able to realize that the proposal could be greatly improved upon by enhancing the visual design. After this meeting I changed the background of the presentation to fit more with the ideas that were mentioned in the proposal. This encounter helped me to realize the importance of visual design. Visual design helps to make a project more appealing to the audience and can greatly help technical writing, and also had to be considered when creating the final presentation for the project XO Orpheus. The XO Orpheus project had a major critical reading component that needed to be presented to the class, so I decided to use a tree as the background of the Prezi. The tree allowed for me to incorporate the growth of the story metaphorically in the shape of a tree, such that the development of the story matched a part of the tree. For example, the backstories, that our short story out of XO Orpheus originated from, was the roots of the tree. This allowed for the audience to easily follow the progression of the presentation and make connections with the story and something that is present in their daily lives. While visual design was the greatest area of improvement for me during