Bill Wolff, PhD

Associate Professor, Communication, Film, and Journalism, Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, PA

#wddf26 Semiotics Assignment

About the Semiotics Assignment

The Semiotics Assignment has three primary goals:

  1. to help students think through and reflect on what they have learned about semiotics, emotional design, typography, and associated theories;
  2. to help students apply what they have learned about semiotics, emotional design, typography, and associated theories;
  3. to provide students with an opportunity to enhance on their presentation skills.

The assignment is informed by five Course Learning Objectives:

Objective 1. Critical Awareness of the Design Theories and Applications
Students will understand and create artifacts using contemporary design theories and approaches to communicative situations.

Objective 2: Effective Communication
Students will understand the principles, practices, and ethics of effective media communication, particularly in terms of semiotics, design, and website redesign.

Objective 3. Ethical and Curiosity-Informed Research
Student will develop and enhance their ability to engage in ethical, curiosity-informed research practices with the goal of increasing their understanding of semiotics, design, and website redesign theories and practices.

Objective 4: Reflection
Students will develop their understanding of the important role of reflection during the reading, creation, and communication process.

Objective 5: Experimentation
Students will know what it feels like to step out of their comfort zones and take risks with their approaches to and understanding of semiotics and web design.

Semiotics Assignment Specifics

In this assignment, students individually are going to bring together what we have learned about semiotics (McCloud and Hall), emotional design (Walter), and typography (Santa Maria) to analyze the front page of an existing website of their own choosing. The assignment will be submitted as a screencast of a recorded presentation.

The assignment is due by Monday, September 28 Wednesday, September 30 at 11:00pm.

The goal of your screencast and presentation will be to illuminate, as Hall describes, “the journey of the message” (p. 46) (or messages) being transmitted by the website you hav chosen. In that way, the screencast and presentation should be seen as you telling the story of the messaging of the website.

The presentation will be 3 minute 30 seconds containing exactly 14 total slides. More info on that below.

The presentation will be based on and assessed using the following rubric:

Choosing a Site

When choosing a site, I recommend one that easily affords the opportunity to discuss the semiotics, emotional design, and typography theories. A site that is too bare will not allow for a diverse discussion. A site that is too busy will overwhelm you with options. You may, if you would like, choose one of the sites you brought to class on Friday, 9/11. It cannot, however, be one that we discussed as a full class. Other sites you cannot consider are:

  • the Web Design course website
  • the SJU website or any of its inner/affiliated pages
  • your own personal website
  • your friends’ websites
  • your family members’ websites
  • hate-based websites

To help you choose, please bring a list of three sites (with URLs) to class on Monday, 9/21. I suggest bringing sites that represent a variety of goals, fields, intentions, organizations (nonprofit vs for profit), and opportunities for engagement.

The Screencast of Your Presentation

Too often presentations are stale and dry or, conversely, long-winded and meandering events where people read bullet points that are on the screen or blather on and on with no end in site. We’re not doing that. We’re going to borrow from a model of presentation that encourages concise storytelling and the narrative form: a modified version of a Pecha Kucha (pronunciation). On the Pecha Kucha website you can watch sample presentations, including the excellent one by Emma Carlow describing the process behind one of her designs.

A Pecha Kucha is comprised of two parts:

  1. a narrative, which is read aloud
  2. a slide presentation, which advances while the narrative is read

Your presentation will have:

  • 14 total slides
  • slides that last 15 seconds, totaling 3:30 seconds
  • slides containing only images (including images that have text on them, such as screenshots) but no bullet points, titles, or other written content
    • you are allowed use symbols that help focus the viewer’s attention, add scale, and so on. These be arrows, outlines, or other symbols.
    • you are allowed to use words on the first slide only in the first of a title and your name

To prepare your narrative, you must you write out exactly what you are going to say, so you can read it aloud. (A 4 minute presentation is about 2 double-spaced pages read aloud.) You cannot present this off-the-cuff. The challenge will be for you to time your narrative so topics change in synch with the slides.

Typefaces
When discussing the typeface (as is required for at least one slide), you must identify the actual typeface. I recommend using the WhatFont Google Chrome Plugin, which very easily allows you to identify site typefaces. It does not, however, work with typefaces in images. There are tools that claim to be able to do that, but I find they are very unreliable.

Rubric

Submission

Please submit your work using:

Creating the Screencast of Your Presentation

You are required to use GoogleSlides in combination with the Awesome Screenshot plugin on Google Chrome for the presentation. Here’s a short tutorial on how to set up and record your presentation:

The assignment is due by Monday, September 28 Wednesday, September 30 at 11:00pm.

Course Info at a Glance

  • Office Hours: MW 12:30 – 1:30
  • Office Location: Bronstein Annex 202