Welcome to my post about the individual part of our latest project ‘The Medium Is The Message’.

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What Was This Project❓

Our driving question in this project was ‘How Does What We Hear, Read, and See Influence Us’. To answer our driving question we created advertisements for businesses in Deep Cove. We learned about how advertising works and the strategies that are used in advertisements among other stuff that I am going to cover in this post. This project was a group project but in this post I am only going to go over the individual aspect of this project. I am also going to take you through each stage of the project path and what we did during each stage as well as give some extra thoughts along the way.

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Launch 🚀 

In the launch phase we did a couple things. The first thing we did was develop our need to knows. These are things that we needed to know in order to complete our project which in this case was creating an ad for a business. We divided this up into three parts, Product, Process, and Content. These need to knows are something that we would later revisit and add to as the project went on. The second thing we did was learn how to analyze text. In order to make an advertisement we first needed to learn how to analyze and understand text. To do this we watched an ad created by Apple to promote their HomePod. We then wrote a paragraph about what we thought the message of the ad was and how they used it to reach their target audience.

Welcome Home Ad

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Building Knowledge💡

In building knowledge we learned about a lot of different things relating to media. We learned about different design principles pertaining to media and how to effectively use them. We also learned about different angels and ways that you can take a photos (bird’s eye view, worm’s eye view, etc.) and how to design a great photo. We then went on to learn about a lot of different things. One of the things that we learned about, and I found was interesting, was the five key questions of media literacy. We learned about these by looking at our assigned advertisement and then answering each of the five key questions of media literacy and where you can see them in the ad.

The Five Key Questions

The Ad

We also learned about taking historical perspective and analyzing old advertisements using historical perspective. Historical perspective is where you look at something and try to think about it as if you had the same views and thoughts as people who would have seen it at the time it was made. We also compared historical perspective to our present perspective on the same ad to see how they were different and how society and its views have changed over the years.

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Develop and Critique 🔁

In develop and critique we started to actually put together our advertisements. The business that my group had chosen was Zücker which is a candy store. This stage included creating a draft, then sharing it, then getting critique on it, and then revising it to make it better. For my first individual draft I created something that I thought was really good. After showing it to the teacher I realized that there was not story to it. It was just a nice looking image. So for my next draft I knew what I needed to do. I knew that I wanted to have more of a story and I came up with some extra design changes. I decided to add a slogan that said ‘Part of The Community’ to give the ad a story. I also changed up some stuff to do with the design and images used in my second draft. I then noticed that the text was quite difficult to read and I also wasn’t happy with the aspect ratio I had been using. For my third and final draft I decided to go with a more flat colour pallet that wasn’t as bright and also put some images that showed the fact that the business is a local business and that they were part of the community, really leaning into that slogan. I am really happy with how my third draft turned out and I think that if I had not done the other two drafts it would not have looked as good.

My Individual Drafts

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Present 📢

For this part there is not much to write. In this part we took our draft three ads and shared them with the group. The plan was to have everyone share their ads and we all said what we liked and what we were going to take from each individual draft and put into our group drafts that would be sent to the business that we chose (Zücker). This was a great part of the project because it was nice to be able to show off my final draft that I was really proud of and also was fun to see my group members versions.

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Final Thoughts 🧠

So now for some final thoughts on this part of the project. I really enjoyed creating my individual versions of the draft. I had a lot of fun messing around with different features in Canva and learning about all the work and thought that goes into creating an advertisement. I think that I am now a lot more aware of what is going on around me and when I see an advertisement I am more knowledgeable now about what it is trying to do and how it is trying to trick me. While this project is still not over, and we have lots more work to do in terms of group drafts and getting our final group advertisement finished, I have really enjoyed most parts of this project and am looking forward to wrapping it up and seeing all of my work pay off.