What I have learned from my Visual Rhetoric & Design course is that it is best to start thinking of intelligent ways to appeal to your audience before you even touch a mouse to open an Adobe application.

Lisa Graham’s Basics of Design, Second Edition teaches the importance of deciding what you want to say and who you want to say it to, before the project is actually managed.  Knowing what your audience wants is the key to keeping their attention on your production. 

The Summers Siblings’ hand guide, Creating Websites that Work, provides great pointers as to what an audience expects when they crack open a web design software program. 

Reflection

My time in Dr. Sun’s class was edifying overall, yet there were two things I wish I had done more of:

1. 1.Collaborate more with the other classmates
   

2. 2.Share ideas to get a feel for what others are thinking
   

If there were anything I would consider revising in the Design course, it would be to spend more time working with the print and web design software in order to tie together the ends of theory and practice. 

Yes, we should have more frequent quizzes, in order to keep us motivated to read the assigned readings.

And yes, we should share ideas and collaborate more with our classmates.