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Document Design Workshop: Part Two
                                                                                    Applying Visual SPD & Infographics

Key Concepts:

#1 - Documents produced with new literacy require visual space, visual progression, visual differentiation. 

#2 - Infographics are essential components of today's new literacy documents.

The following videos take you deep inside the workings of visual space, progression, and differentiation as you analyze a magazine article to watch the new literacy in action. 






Try This

Part 1: Add an infographic to one page of any document (letter, memo, report) that you have authored in the past. The infographic may contain real or fabricated information for the purposes of this assignment.
Infographic Option: PowerPoint 2007. There are a variety of tools you can use to produce infographics such as charts, which can in turn be used in your documents. PowerPoint offers strong graphics capabilities and seamless interface with Excel.  Also, a major innovation to Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 is the addition of SmartArt, a group of more than 80 infographics. Here is a short training course in using them: Microsoft Office 2007 SmartArt Graphics.

Here are two links to tutorials also on PowerPoint 2007's chart engine: Insert Charts and Format Charts.

Finally, the following links provide tutorials on using the graphing function of Microsoft Excel: MicroSoft Excel 2007 Tutorial for Creating Charts. (If you are still using Office 2003, a list of tutorials for that program is here.)

Infographic Option: NCES Graph Wizard. Not into MS Office? Nada problem. Here is a link to a great graph wizard. Create your graph, save it as a .jpg or .gif, then insert it into any  document: National Council of Education Statistics.

In addition to PPT 2007 and the NCES Graph Wizard, feel free to use any other graphing engine you are comfortable with.

Part 2: Using the principles of Visual SPD, redesign the first page of any document (letter, memo, report) that you have authored in the past. Compare it to the "before" version. What are the surprising differences?

Below are "before" and "after" examples. The document on the left represents what is most often produced by writers who have not been introduced to chunking and document design techniques. On the right is the same document with Visual SPD elements applied to it. Below the thumbnails is an instructional video on how to transform the before into the after.
Before thumb AFTER DOC
Click on image to open document