Week 08 – First Due Date

Article Promotion Project Description

Background

Much of what drives traffic and revenue online is the proper promotion of engaging content. The best article that no one knows about doesn't do anyone any good. Conversely, a really solid promotion plan that drives a ton of traffic to garbage content is clickbait and isn't sustainable. The best situation is to create engaging content and a solid promotion plan that drives traffic to that content. In this unit, you will be writing an article and creating visuals to accompany that article.

Remember! A successful campaign uses multiple tweets or posts to promote an article. One tweet or post is not sufficient.

Project Components

Article

The article should be written with a specific message and with an audience in mind. The article should use best practices for online writing including the subject, formatting and length. While there is no specific length for this assignment, it should have enough value to satisfy the reader.

Visuals

The visuals that accompany the article will serve two purposes. First, they will be used in the promotion of the article on social media channels. Second, they will be used in the article to help guide the reader and reinforce or expand the concepts in the article. Due to the different sizes and displaying options of different channels, the visuals may need to be redesigned or reformatted for different channels. The visuals can take any form including, but not limited to, photography, photo manipulation, illustration, design, video, motion graphic, etc or any combination of those.

While there is not a specific number required, when you create more visuals you have more opportunities to promote your content. Remember that this is a Social Media Design course and the visuals will carry significant weight in the grading of this project.

Word lists:

A wordlist is a brainstorming activity to help you create scroll stopping images. Scroll stopping images are needed in today's current seascape to stand out amoungst the floods of content. To create a word list you will:

  1. Identify 3-5 themes, ideas or concepts from the article.
  2. Write them on top of the page.
  3. Under each one, make a list of words or phrases (should be extensive)
  4. Combine a word from 2 or more lists and see what ideas you come up with to visually represent the combination of those words

A good wordlist should help you combine/create visuals in a new way to encourage your audience to stop themselves from scrolling on social media and check out your content.

What is due?

Last week you wrote your article and started brainstorm ideas for images which would be interesting and stop your audience from scrolling. By the end of this week, you will create the visuals and publish your blog post. To help you nail down the composition and flow, first create two kinds of comps.

Comps are often presented to decision makers before a project can move on to the production steps. After the comps have been created, the client is able to view the design as it nears completion. This ensures that the client is happy with the visual execution of the project before time and money are spent to produce it.

Layout Comps

The layout comp shows the relative size and position of images and text even though the client’s images and text are not yet available. Stock photos or illustrations may appear on the layout comp to represent the client’s images, and Lorem Ipsum type, nonsense text, can represent the size, fonts, and other treatment of body copy, headlines, and captions.

A comp is usually a digital file for the client’s review. It is not a sketch of the ideas. For this stage in comping your images, create at least 4 layout comps which explore one idea from your sketches.

Value Comps

A value comp is the next step in the composition stages. You will pick one comp from the layout comp exercise and start to adjust the value of the design elements within the layout. Value is defined as the relative lightness or darkness of a color. It is an important tool for the designer, in the way that it defines form and creates spatial illusions. Contrast of value separates objects in space and builds a hierarchy within the design.

A value comp is like the layout comp and is usually a digital file. Like the layout comp, create at least 4 value comps which explore a single layout comp.

Where to submit

After you have created your Layout Comps and Value Comps, add a comment to the coinciding post to your class’ FACEBOOK GROUP. Both items can be included as one comment.