This workshop supports the journey to understanding information design for pages and screens. During the workshop, you will study an existing document to determine the details and design specifications, and then do your best to clone it in Adobe InDesign.
Your work on this assignment will result in the recreation of an existing document.
For the complete details about how to submit your work, see Submission Requirements.
This workshop continues to emphasize the power of Adobe InDesign. That is knowledge that will continue to serve you this semester, as well as throughout your time in RPW courses and programs.
Although tools are themselves essential to your success, tools always serve design processes in some way. The core challenge in this workshop is emulation. Many (perhaps most) experienced, effective information designers have honed their knowledge and abilities through cloning other designers' creations. This is a staple professional development process.
We can learn a lot beyond the nuances of tools from reproducing documents. We learn how designers think. We learn to appreciate the creative process that results in specific design features and strategies. We can more easily assess the qualities and characteristics of a document, and consider how we might do it differently given the chance to create our own version. All of these experiences are professionally productive.
During this workshop, you will complete 4 tasks.
You may choose your own document to examine, or you may use the document I have provided in the Workshop Support folder on SVSU Canvas. If you choose your own document, select one that includes the following qualities and characteristics:
You may choose a document from any source, as long as it has recognizable pages or screens that you can analyze and reproduce. This includes books, brochures, reports, as well as web sites, apps, and other digital material.
Make note of the following details about your object of study for your own use. Record these details in a Google Doc so you can link your notes to your summary report.
Note. When you catalog document details, focus your attention on the 2 pages/screens that you will reproduce. That is, if there are content elements that appear only on pages of the document that you will not attempt to reproduce, do not bother noting those specifications.
Note. Most people do not memorize the specifications of font families, although over time you will likely learn to recognize commonly used fonts. Your smart phone can help. Search Font Identify (or something like that) on your app store, and review the results. On Apple iOS, for example, the top app that results from this search is called WhatTheFont. That app will not definitively identify fonts, but it will offer you a list of likely possibilities. Refer to the resource "Top 5 Tools to Identify a Font" that is linked to the Pages page in SVSU Canvas for other options.
Use Adobe InDesign to recreate the 2 pages or screens upon which you focused your attention during the examination phase of the workshop. Reproduce those pages as close to exact as you can manage.
Convert your final cloned document to PDF. Remember that this process is initiated under the Export menu in InDesign.
Reflect upon the process. Craft a 200-word summary report directly in the Canvas Discussion forum for the workshop. Organize your report into 2 roughly equal sections.
Construct your summary report so it feels professional in detail and design.
Attach or link the following files to your report.
Post your summary report to the forum dedicated to this workshop on Canvas Discussions. Attach/link the PDF of the document you created, the document you cloned, and the Google Doc where you gathered details about the document you cloned.
In addition, post the following files to the Workshops folder on your shared Dropbox space.
Label the files using appropriate filenames that make clear which documents I need to locate to assess your work for this workshop.
There are 50 possible points for this workshop. You will earn points according to this standard.
This material has evolved over many years of teaching & research, and is protected by U.S. copyright laws.
If you are here because of random chance, or because this content came up in a search, then please feel free to explore the site. If you are a teacher or other professional in any context who would like to use any of my course content in your work, I grant you permission to do so with the following limitations.