Design Plan Tips

jtirrell's picture

The following is a list of tips that will help you make your design plans the best that they can be.

  • Structure your design plans by establishing the goals of the instruction set through its statement of purpose (sense of purpose, audience, context) and how it will accomplish them (strategies, medium, arrangement). Then discuss the testing process. Look at pages 52-54 of Compose, Design, Advocate excerpt 2 for a walk-through of creating a design plan (with example).



  • Don't use "I" at all if possible in your design plans. Don't talk about your process producing the text; talk about what the text does and how it works. (You will talk about your design process in the postmortem.)



  • "People who are interested in X" is not a specific audience, and it doesn't give us anything to use when shaping our text. What traits about your target audience are relevant? What features are your strategies, medium, and arrangement targeting?



  • Your discussion of context should be specific. Where and how will your audience encounter your instructions? If your work is supposed to be posted online, on what website would it be posted? If it is supposed to be a printed booklet, where would this booklet be distributed (On endcaps at Best Buy? Contained in product packaging?)? Answers to these questions will give evidence for your production choices, because you will be designing to fit a real existing context.



  • Remember that your design plans should reflect how the text functions in its finished state, because the design plan has been continually updated to reflect the corresponding instruction set.



  • A design plan is a whole document, not a collection of parts. Our drafts started as lists of parts (purpose, audience, context, strategies, medium, arrangement, testing), but final drafts should be narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. All the parts of the design plan must connect; they must communicate with each other and work together. Look at pages 52-54 of Compose, Design, Advocate excerpt 2 for an example of how to turn design plan parts into a whole document.



  • You must connect production issues (strategies, medium, arrangement) with your statement of purpose (sense of purpose, audience, context). There's not much point in stating that your instruction set uses particular colors or that it is arranged in a certain way unless you demonstrate how these features help the document accomplish its goals.