The Medium Is The Message: Summative Blog Post

The Medium Is The Message

Welcome to my summative blog post! The Medium Is The Message project is finally done and here are my thoughts on the process and the project in general. The driving question of this project was How Does What We Hear, Read, and See Influence Us? Throughout the course of this project, we used several techniques to try and answer that driving question.

There were lots of milestones and stepping stones involved to try and answer the driving question. I must admit it got repetitive and rather tedious at times but it was a key part of understanding the message and the medium. I think something that really helped develop my ad drafts was learning about common design errors and how to fix them. This really developed my knowledge about digital design. In my last post, I included a visual of my notes from learning about the errors. You can also see some of my ad drafts in my last post. With the notes I took, I identified some of the mistakes I made while trying to create some drafts. 

After my individual drafts were done, I got with my group members, Fraser, Cooper, Kwosen, and Jocelyn to make some group drafts to send to Paul, the owner of Covert. Our group took a trip into the Cove to get some photos of the cinnamon buns for our ads. Using our design principles, we made some group drafts using the feedback we got from Paul from our individual ads that he critiqued. I was unfortunately absent for the week when we had critique from an Apple marketing employee but my group used the advice to make more drafts.  We also added the badge from the cinnamon bun competition that Covert recently won. We ended up cutting out the coffee cup from our final draft and sent it to Paul. We received some very positive feedback from Covert! Here is the ad we sent to Paul:

Process and my learning

In this project, I had three curricular competencies to follow. In milestone 5, I wrote a paragraph on The Gospel According To Larry and McLuhan’s text and how they tie in together. I think I did well on this because I used the English 8 Comprehending Texts competency to it’s fullest extent. The Gospel According To Larry was a book we read in class and it had a message of anti-consumerism and showed what the media actually does. McLuhan was the person who coined the phrase “The medium is the message.” He wrote about how the media affects us and how it is actually the message. The assignment was to write about how those texts tied into one another and explain how the medium is the message using examples from The Gospel According To Larry.

A competency I think I could have used better is Social Studies 8, Using historical perspective. This was put to the test in Milestone 2, where we analyzed historical media. Since I didn’t use the competencies properly, I got a sunny cloud on that milestone. Since this is PLP, there were definitely some revisions made until I achieved a sun. I feel like this assignment definitely helped with my understanding of PBL and how effective revisions are. 

How does what we hear, read, and see influence us?

This was the driving question for our project. I think that the way it influences us is by becoming part of our daily routine. The way that the media is so normalized is remarkable when you stop to think about it. A great example of the way it influences us when we read The Gospel According To Larry in class, it made me super conscious of consumerism and what I buy. That is just an everyday example of media influencing people and you could probably think of lots more if you tried.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I really enjoyed this project! I think learning about digital design, the media, and the message was super interesting. Making an ad for a real audience was super fun. Please let me know what you think of the final ad draft in the comments! Goodbye for now!

Sincerely, me