February 18, 2022

Jamal-Jared Alexander Partners with the Inclusion Center

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USU graduate student Jamal-Jared Alexander’s English 4410: Document Design & Graphics course has partnered with the Inclusion Center to develop a set of print documents. The course is intended to provide students with a solid foundation of knowledge about document design and how to make and defend design decisions when creating documents for professional contexts. Students engage in iterative design while learning about the human visual system and how the human body perceives visual information. Students learn about sketching, typography, color, and graphics throughout this course. The opportunity to collaborate with the Inclusion Center has given the students the chance to apply their skills within complex, real-world contexts.

The Inclusion Center has gone through several iterations of its marketing and has struggled to get input from graphic designers on how to best create different advertisements and effective marketing techniques to appeal to specific audiences. With this problem in mind, the question that ENGL 4410: Document Design & Graphics addresses is: how can the ENGL 4410 course assist the Inclusion Center with increasing their level of visibility throughout the campus and the Logan community so that students know they exist and play an importantrole in advocating for and supporting them?

Student teams worked directly with one program coordinator who acted as their client and met with them four to six times throughout the semester. Each meeting was treated as a professional encounter where transparent conversations were held to effectively negotiate best practices for inclusivity and ensure the design aspects met the client’s needs.
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Throughout the semester, student teams were provided with multiple readings that focused on print and electronic designing tools (e.g., Parker’s Looking Good in Print, Kostelnick & Roberts’ Designing Visual Language, Kimball & Hawkins’ Document Design, etc.). Student teams had a clear understanding of what (not) to do when making design choices; however, clients were encouraged to express their (dis)likes while helping students understand why and how certain choices were (in)effective for their target audience.

Each student team was partnered with specific program coordinators who needed document design and graphics assistance for USU’s underrepresented student organizations. With this being a service-learning course, the collaboration with the Inclusion Center had a spirit of civic responsibility and existed as a means to bring ownership to the learning process while enabling students to experience transferable skills most needed in the community and the workplace. Student teams developed inclusive practices to help effectively design graphic documents that appeal to diverse communities here on USU’s campus. Students (a) were exposed to new realities that push against their cultural norms, (b) identified (in)effective design practices and choices to help them select the most appropriate options based on their client’s needs, (c) played a part in enhancing diversity and inclusion within their university community, and (e) learned how communities are represented via marketing materials while understanding how that representation influences design decisions.

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