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 your map 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 map; talk about what the map 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 map. What traits about your target audience are relevant? What features are your strategies, medium, and arrangement targeting?



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



  • A design plan is a whole document ith a beginning, middle, and end, not a collection of parts. All the elements 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 connect 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 map uses particular icons or that it is arranged in a certain way unless you demonstrate how these features help the document accomplish its goals.