How Does What We Hear, Read, and See Influence Us?

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog post on my current PLP project! This is all about my advertising project and creating an ad for a local business. These are my thoughts on the Launch Cycle and some steps to creating the advertisement drafts above.

LAUNCH cycle

In L, we developed our Need To Knows, and researched possible businesses that our group could create an ad for. We came up with five possible options for businesses and ranked them by number. Our first choice was Covert Neighbourhood Cafe. We got approved to make an ad for them. Our next step was to use our group LAUNCH to learn everything about our business that we could. This also answered some of our Need To Knows. We set up a phone interview with the manager so we could start on our project path.

U was a key step to prepare for the interview. It was about understanding what our business was all about. We looked at their previous ads, which we found an unfortunate lack in. Our group spent some time looking at their website to find out specifics about their business like their colour scheme and and fonts that they use. Another thing we did was check out Covert’s social media’s and reviews where we found some useful knowledge as well.

A was all about asking tons of questions. We had our interview set up but we needed to chose specific questions to help with our ad drafts. In A, we found some key questions to ask and put them into the interview script.

After we had completed our interview via phone, we moved on to N. the main idea of N is navigating ideas. We got answers about target audience, design preferences and more. N was a huge step in creating ads for our business. Step one was brainstorming ad draft ideas in our LAUNCH journal. In step two, we mood boarded ideas, themes, and aesthetics which we then put into our group LAUNCH journal. For step 3, we created some design principles as a group. These were about things like layout, colours, and what we agreed to put into our advertisement drafts. 

With these design principles in mind, we started creating drafts. A key app I used was Canva. Canva had lots of templates to help with design drafts. Critique is an essential element in PLP, which is why we never go with the first draft we make. When we moved on to Highlighting and Fixing our ads, we studied common design errors and what we could do to stop them. Here are some notes I took on design errors

All these things helped with the drafts you see above. These are my thoughts on the LAUNCH cycle and how it helped with creating ads for our business.

Building Knowledge 💡 

In Building Knowledge, we learned all about graphic design, media, and message.

 Taking good photos is an essential part of our advertisement so we learned about that a bit. we went with our group to take some practice photos using the techniques we learned about like Bird’s Eye View, Worm’s Eye View, Close up view, and long shot view. We also learned about graphic design principles and used them to create an example of the use of the principle.

In building knowledge, we also learned about media. We learned lots of media related definitions, the media triangle, media literacy, and using historical perspective. Learning about media was a key part of Milestone 2, Historical Media Analysis.

The last part of building knowledge was learning what message is and how it gets projected to the public. This part was super interesting to me because I loved learning how companies used techniques and appeals to reach out and influence the public. We learned about Pathos, Ethos, Logos, and more specific techniques as well. In conclusion, Building Knowledge was a super helpful and informative step that definitely helped with my ad drafts.

Develop and Critique 🔁

Develop and critique is always a huge step in PBL. In this step, we read The Gospel According To Larry and reflected on it and made an Advertising Photo Journal.

The Gospel According To Larry is a book we did a novel study on with a main message of anti-consumerism and how the media affects the way we live our lives. We read sections of the book every week and met with our group to dissect the text and talk about the book. For the advertising photo journal, we had a task to take photos of ads we see and put them into a chart where we then identified the message, the techniques and appeals, and the target audience. I’m sure you’ve seen my drafts in my post, and how they’ve changed. For the drafts that my group is developing now, they are slightly similar to my first draft because the Covert manager liked the theme of that draft. 

Present and Reflect 📢 

Presenting and meeting with group members is an essential aspect of working with a group. It’s important to make sure that everyone in the group is on the same page and knows what to do. This is why there was lot’s of collaborating and critiquing each other’s drafts. Our group collectively came up with design principles to make sure that we aren’t lost but sometimes we forgot them and came up with something different which is why we shared all our drafts with our groups.

 

In conclusion, this project has been pretty fun and I’ve learned a ton about graphic design, media, message, and more. Thanks for reading and have a great day!