Blog 10: Semester reflections and the future

When I graduate this May I plan on getting a job as a graphic designer, and I'm sure I will be using plenty of multimedia writing. For example, I will be sending many emails to different clients which is a form of multimedia writing that will help me in the future. It's possible that I will be responsible for keeping a daily blog for the company that I work at also. The skills that I have learned in this class will most likely be used by me daily in the future. If there was one assignment that I had to choose that relates the most to my future as a graphic designer it would have to be the PSA assignment. For the PSA I plan to do a lot of photo editing and some video editing. Throughout college I have learned how to use Photoshop to do those kinds of things. There aren't really any assignments that I wish we would have covered because I think we covered them all. Writing for multimedia is universal throughout all internet writing, so with the skills we've learned we are able to write for any multimedia. My favorite assignment was the printed newsletter assignment because I like to be creative and we were allowed to create a newsletter and be as creative as we want. I have done different layouts for print before, so I was already familliar with the process.
I like everyone's blogs for the simple fact that they are all different. Everyone has their own unique way of interpreting things and it's interesting to see everyone's different views on things.

Comet Branding writing for social media

Sarah Meaney was the guest speaker tonight and she talked about writing for social media. She works at a company called Comet Branding which basically writes blogs and other social media for companies. The company is very small with only 5 employees. Some of the information that was covered in her lecture was how people consume information online, things to strive for when writing online, and also things to avoid when writing online. One of the most interesting parts of her lecture was when she showed an example of eye tracking studies. These eye tracking studies provide information about what people look at when they visit websites. It's very important to grab people's attention right away when you write, especially online. She gave examples of good headlines and examples of bad headlines. You can clearly see which ones worked well and which ones didn't by looking at the eye tracking studies. When writing online it's very important to use the inverted pyramid method of writing which means you need to put your most important information in the beginning. It's all about grabbing people's attention as fast as you can when writing online. The last thing that I found interesting was the differences between print media writing and online media writing. They are completely opposite ways of writing. In print media you want to use full sentences and tell a story, whereas in online writing you can use fragments and you want to get to the point as soon as you can. All in all I think the lecture was very interesting and provided me with a lot of good information.

Here is a link to the Comet Branding website.