Aaron Carter
Mudd
ENG 151
11/17/2011
Campus History in a Big Way.
Ohio University. I have only been here for one quarter, and in that time I have explored campus, asked questions and gotten answers. However, I had not figured out what was going on with the space in between Grover and Peden. Living on West Green here at OU, I would cross over the patch of green on the way to the football games. The earthwork installation in itself doesn’t give you any clue what it is, or the meaning behind it, so I wanted to find out. I feel like a lot of people here don’t know about it because on the way to the games when I would ask the group of kids I was with, no one knew. After looking into it I found out the piece was called “input”. Input was the whole reason I came to this topic at all, but it was unfortunately a fairly new addition to the campus. This made the history part of this piece a little difficult so…..I decided to do my piece on the history of the entire space known as “Bicentennial Park”, and to do so in a manner that appealed to my readers, but without jamming too much information into it.
Effective. That’s really what the goal is right? To be effective, but what is effective? I think “effective” when dealing with historical information is easily done. Well presented, informative information, as well as lots of big (also representative) pictures, all organized in an easily legible way. There are many ways to do this, but the way that most appealed to me, was the brochure. It is neat, organized, and I took some information technology classes in high school that (I think) helped me to be able to make an “effective” brochure. The Brochure is a good way to organize information in an appealing and effective manner. But it is also something that can go VERY WRONG if the wrong person is making it, or the wrong audience is reading it. My audience is OU students really, and students are so constantly bombarded with information that they aren’t going to read a brochure if its jam packed full of information, with no way to “navigate” the text and no pictures. So I chose to create this promo piece on Photoshop, with Photoshop I have the ability to focus more on the visual aspect than I can with other programs, and still get all the information in.
To be effective with this brochure, I had to really narrow down all the information. I don’t have a lot of room to work with in a brochure if I want appealing pictures and not so much information that the reader doesn’t want to get past the first paragraph. So, the first page is a big, picture with lots of color and some text as a label. The cover is however mostly covered by a picture of Bicentennial, hopefully to pull the reader in because it’s a park here at OU and my readers like parks. Throughout the entire brochure I used large, contrasting color headlines so that If someone opened the brochure with the intent of finding a certain piece of information they might actually try to find it because they can make an educated guess on where in the brochure it might be, rather than having to can the entire 5 pages of all txt. The txt I have isn’t too small, it’s easy to read, and not too much is on each page. When I go to read a brochure, I’m more willing to start reading if I see a few paragraphs of information rather than an entire column of text. The pictures all are big and clear and representative of the text they are near, and they all blend with the background giving it a visual appeal. Overall, this piece is “easy on the eyes”, and has reasonably lengthen, well organized information. And should be fairly appealing to the reader at a first glance,
If that first glance is effective as I hope, then I believe the content I chose would have satisfied the reader. When I first started brainstorming and researching for this project, I was only looking up information on “Input”, the piece of earthwork in the park. After finding out it was newly installed in the campus I had to expand on that to suit my audiences craving for history, as well as the current information. I chose to include a “Where” section so that if the reader hasn’t yet seen the piece they can find out where it is on campus to “check it out”. A “When” section to give the reader some kind of time frame or time line in which this topic is contained. Trautwein was the first campus Occupant of that space so it’s obviously a must for this piece. I however chose to leave out the history behind Trautwein’s name and anything about “baseball” so I did not clutter up the page with information that had nothing to do with the park. I had to include “Input” in the brochure even though it’s not part of the history because it was my original reason for coming to this topic. If it were not for “Input” then I would not be doing this. I also chose the presidential sidewalk on the side of the park because it is history. All of the president’s names are inscribed chronologically in the stone. If the cover of the brochure pulled my reader into the content, then the content itself along with the organization of the content kept them should keep them hooked for the whole piece.
To truly appeal to readers, the information and piece in its entirety must appeal to ethos, logos, and pathos. I tried to appeal to the readers’ ethos with the last paragraph of the piece. It says sarcastically “Now days, all the space is good for is looking neat, and a spot for people to lay around. What a great use of all that money”. I hope these appeals to my reader’s values and morals because I value recreational green space and economic efficiency, and it doesn’t seem to me a big useless artwork is a good way to use the space. I appealed to pathos with the front cover. The front cover is a picture of Bicentennial Park, and I feel like most of the students here really like this campus and seeing it in this light brings about a positive emotion. But beyond the values and emotion I really appealed to logic as well, with well labeled and easily readable titles and factual information my reader should feel or know that this is a well done piece. This piece appeals to the emotion, values, and logic of any of the readers I am trying to please.
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