About the Assignment
Design personas are an excellent way to “flesh out your [web site] design’s personality” (Walter, p. 35) and provide you with a clear aesthetic guide for how you want to look and, importantly, feel to users.
Walter discusses the Design Persona process on pages 35 – 47. On pages 36 and 37 he lists the key sections of a Design Persona. Download a copy of the Design Persona Template (.pdf), which adds additional features. Using the Template and the below former student examples, create your own Design Persona for your web site.
This assignment is informed by the following Course Objectives:
Objective 2: Effective Communication
Students will be able to identify and employ a range of effective communication strategies to navigate audience, purpose, and context.
Objective 3: Human-Centered Design
Students will understand and apply human centered design approaches to communicating through digital media.
Objective 4: Reflection
Students will develop their understanding of the important role of reflection during the investigation, design, and communication process.
Objective 5: Risk-taking
Students will know what it feels like to step out of their comfort zones and take risks with their approaches to and understanding of web design.
Assignment Specifics
You will see that the Design Personae has the following sections. Use the prompts in the template to guide your content as well as the updates/changes listed below:
- Overview: This is where you should be writing about what personality you want your site to have. Seamlessly include your Why, How, and What statements from your homework. You can also think about a designer or celebrity whose aesthetic you’d like your site to represent.
- Field Diversity Statistics: Present the diversity statistics of your future field, based on the homework we completed. (new for Fall 2020)
- Job Selection Intentionality: Discuss the kind of business you hope to join and how that connects to your Why statements, and based on the homework on this we completed. (new for Fall 2020)
- Brand Traits: Complete as described in the template.
- Personality Map: Complete as pictured in the template.
- Voice: Complete as described in the template.
- Mood Board: Create a Mood Board based on a diverse collection of found or original photographs
- Visual Lexicon: Use the three sections in the template—Color, Typography, General Style Notes—but don’t just list the colors or the font.
- Include specific color swatches including the hex or RGB color codes.
- Include 2 sets of header and content font combinations, including sample content.
- We will be using GoogleFonts, so please look for fonts there
- Engagement Methods: Complete as described in the template.
In the past, students have also included logos and other design features to enhance their personas. Look back to the work you completed in Digital Aesthetics or one of Dr. Sullivan’s or Dr. Knight’s design courses and see how you have presented design ideas. Make the document aesthetically pleasing, as well.
Here are several examples for what you could do with your design persona (all samples used with permission). Note samples 1 and 2 are missing either the hex/RGB codes and the font examples because they were not required at the time:
Submission Info and Due Date
I will share with you a Google Folder called “Design Personas, Fall 2020.”
Monday, October 12: Please upload to that folder a PDF version of your design persona named “yourlastname-design-persona.pdf” by 11:00pm.