Final Senior Project Jennifer Craig
Project in Brief: Magazine and simple website for young adults I will design about living with a shunt and cerebral palsy (most of the information I’ve seen is for parents of infants/young children as the caregivers, not for the individual with the disabilities themselves, our own point of view, how we handle the challenges of living with these disabilities, with the degree of severity affecting quality of life, or self-help resources available). The website will also have a print piece used as promotional material to direct people to the website, such as a brochure that will be left in doctor’s offices, wellness centers, and college departments such as the Office of Disability Resources.
Creative Brief:
State objectives of project Create a website and promotional piece that is a resource for people with CP that may or may not have shunts
Main audience(s) young adults with disabilities (18-25 years old) , people at different stages of their life and the challenges they face
Main message Informative resource for those with CP to help with everyday challenges
Words/phrases that describe project; tone/attitude hope, help, courage, friends, discussion, difficulty, coping tips, self-help, sense of community, “you are not alone!”
Competitors/barriers to success complicated medical websites, trying to put the information in everyday language
When browsing through stacks of magazines at the checkout line, a stand at Barnes & Noble, or a table at the doctor's office, have you ever come across a magazine about people with disabilities? I haven't. I would think that this subject would be important to the special interest genre of magazine publishers in a more mainstream manner. Since I have cerebral palsy, I decided to focus my project on this to better educate myself and my peers about this condition.
Cerebral Palsy is basically a miscommunication between the brain and body that results in muscle deformity and trouble with body movement as well as some mental delay. According to cerebralpalsypublications.com, there are some magazines, such as Cerebral Palsy magazine, Abilities magazine and Special Child that are published on a quarterly basis by the medical community to share information to the caregivers of young children with Cerebral Palsy.
As a graphic designer, I am a creative problem-solver. To fill this gap in information available to its primary audience, I have written and designed a magazine that shares the stories of people with Cerebral Palsy, allowing readers to know they they have an outlet to talk about their lives and the challenges they face and how they overcome them. The magazine’s intent is to give advice and insight from real life stories which fosters a sense of community and a feeling that you are not alone. I made a print design because it’s something physical you can hold in your hand to refer back to many times, as a take-away, self-help kind of resource that can be reassuring when things get tough, and stories from others offer a new point of view. The one page website offers a way to promote the printed magazine, keep digital copies as an archive when more issues are developed, as well as a way to reach a wider audience range.
The process for creating the magazine was to first start with making a creative brief of the objective of the assignment. Then I researched different websites and magazines about people with disabilities. I saw common themes in formatting and layout that helped to inform my decisions about typefaces and color. I chose Grotesque Mt Standard for the title of the magazine, “Perseverance”, and for the headlines as well to help distinguish it from body copy and carry the font family throughout the document. Grotesque is a monotype sans-serif that contrasts nicely with Arno Pro, a humanist serif typeface. Arno Pro is the body copy and pull quotes since it is good to use at smaller sizes for it’s readability for larger blocks of text. Color choice was determined by researching the different kinds of color blindness and vision impairments someone might have as part of their disability. Green and purple seemed to be the easiest combination to distinguish across a variety of color blindness types. So I used Pantone 274 C as the dark purple, and Pantone 346 C as the light green.
Over the course of the project, I researched, interviewed, and wrote articles that I thought would appeal to my target audience. I experimented with column widths, contrast in positive and negative space, headline titles and creating spreads with and without illustrations or photography to see how I could increase the pacing and movement of the work. The hierarchy of the information is shown through the use of color and typographic weight.
The audience will benefit from this project by understanding that the magazine format is still relevant today because of sharing information that is relatable on a personal level. They can subscribe online, by sending in a subscription card, or reading about it at a health center.
TEXT FROM ORIGINAL PROPOSAL :
Idea 1 Senior Project Proposal
Project in Brief: Website for young college-age (18-25 years old) adults I will design/code about living with a shunt and cerebral palsy (most of the information I’ve seen is for parents of infants/young children as the caregivers, not for the individual with the disabilities themselves, our own point of view, how we handle the challenges of living with these disabilities, with the degree of severity affecting quality of life, or self-help resources available). The website will also have a print piece used as promotional material to direct people to the website, such as a brochure that will be left in doctor’s offices, wellness centers, and college departments such as the Office of Disability Resources and Admissions.
Project in Detail: I have cerebral palsy (CP) and a ventriculoperitoneal (VP) shunt because of cerebrospinal fluid build-up following a bleeding in my brain due to complications during my premature birth and was a twin. (I was born three months early and weighed 1 pound, 11 ounces.) A VP shunt helps balance the fluid around the brain to reduce pressure. Cerebral Palsy is basically a miscommunication between the brain and body that results in muscle deformity and trouble with body movement as well as some mental delay.
I have known other classmates with the same disabilities as me, with varying degrees of severity. I want to design an informational website with a discussion forum to help young adults with these conditions to show that they are not alone. We face unique challenges in our daily lives that the average person does not think about. I want to have my website be a self-help resource for others like myself to understand the “why” behind things that happen. One example is that in my research I learned recently that why I have severe involuntary muscle spasms when I am extremely stressed or emotional is because I have trouble articulating what I’m feeling so my body reacts to the stress physically. Symptoms of CP are often more visible or intense during periods of stress, and now that I understand why that happens to me, it does not panic me as much as it has before, because I just try to calm myself down and wait for it to stop, where as before I would become more anxious because I was afraid I was about to go into a seizure.
I think this project is important because if you have a mild form of CP like I do, it can often be “invisible” to others unless a problem arises. I hope this website will help increase awareness of the self and help others understand what we go through as well. Content-wise, working on this project will help me not only understand myself better, the information I research will reduce anxiety due to lack of knowledge and information if something happens. I also think an important aspect of it is the discussion forum and reader-submitted stories to help foster a sense of community.
The only other resource I am aware of that is written from the point of view of the person with a disability like mine (not from/for the caregivers) is Katy Fetter’s Teen Cerebral Palsy blog. Like me, she wants a resource to come to, like a support group. Her blog was featured in an article written on October 4, 2012 on cpfamilynetwork. org and she has been on television (an episode of Live Life and Win!) explaining why it’s important to help each other understand what CP is and how to cope through her blog. According to that TV episode, 10,000 to 15,000 people read her blog each month. So I think exploring an online solution for my project would be effective as well.
For my project, designing a brochure will be an in-depth print design portfolio piece that encompasses all of what I have learned about creating quality graphic design so far: from typesetting text, understanding visual weight and hierarchy of images and text and how to make those two elements work together and not against each other. Building the website will be the kind of project that can be revisited later as I discover more information to share, so there can potentially be many pages to the website. I can also create an advertisement for the website that would appear in magazines and online as promotional material in addition to the brochure.
For my target audience, the young adult aspect is because we are faced with so many life challenges of college and apartment hunting and starting a career and dating etc., just like our peers, but how we process/ deal with information, our physical challenges, our emotions, can be a hindrance with how “successful” we are in life and how we deal with social standards and expectations. We have to hunt for information on our own in learning how to deal with our challenges. In many ways my body is still a child or a young teenager and that’s how it is because of my disabilities. No one sat down with me and explained why it takes me 5-10 minutes to buckle a clasp on my shoes or button a shirt is because my fine motor skills aren’t up to par. No one tossed a handbook at me and was like, here is what has happened to you and here’s how you can cope with it. Everything I have read is about telling the parent of the infant with CP what signs to look for and if the child has a shunt, what to do if your shunt malfunctions. I want my project to become that resource, to make something so others like me understand the WHY behind things happening instead of people just telling us to accept it because they don’t know the answer either.
Another reason I wanted to make a print design is because it’s something physical you can hold in your hand, a take-away self-help kind of resource that can be reassurance when things get tough, while the website becomes a growing collection of tips and points the way to professional assistance and stories from others to get a new point of view. I think making a small website would be great because it would help me refresh my memory on coding and web design aesthetics as well as reinforce the importance of support and discussion for the audience.
The type of information I want to include in my project is a one-stop shop for support and clear, plain-language resources, such as symptom recognition for different scenarios, like shunt malfunctions, what to do if you have a seizure, etc. I also want to include tips on dealing with stress and emotions, such as yoga, because a lot of us have difficulties in articulation of our speech and thought patterns. I will include tips and suggestions on taking care of our bodies and mental health, with specific ideas depending on the severity of the condition. Links to professional resources, contact information to professionals, doctors, support groups. Have an article or two written about specific scenarios or symptoms experienced and what the causes are behind it physically or mentally that is related to having CP or a shunt (like what I learned about the connection between emotional stress and muscle spasms).
Creative Brief:
State objectives of project
Create a website and promotional piece that is a resource for people with CP that may or may not have shunts
Main audience(s)
young adults with disabilities (18-25 years old)
Main message/single most important take-away idea
Informative resource for those with CP to help with everyday challenges
Words/phrases that describe project; tone/attitude
Hope, Help, Courage, Friends, Discussion, Difficulty, Coping Tips
Other key messages
self-help, sense of community, “you are not alone!”
Competitors/barriers to success
complicated medical websites, trying to put the information in everyday language
Mandatory elements
Strong Information Architecture design, support links, find a way to advertise the site (print promo piece)
Research:
• cerebral_palsy.pdf
• hydrocephalus-topic-overview
• Palsy_Increased_Seizures/
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complications-of-hydrocephalus/#signs_symptoms1
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ebscohost.com.proxy.longwood.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db =e000xna&AN=268661&site=eds-live&scope=site