Date: April 5, 2009
To: J. Tirrell
From: Scott Stella, Group 7
Subject: Individual Activity Report 1
The blog post will summarize what has been done this week for the white paper project.
Zebulon sent out initial emails to the group to get acquainted with everyone, and I suggested that everyone do a reply-all with ideas for a topic for this project. After everyone sent out their top three, we decided on PDA's and SmartPhones. We felt that everyone had sufficient background to be able to talk about these items and to be able to format an appropriate white paper that considers several options of PDA's and SmartPhones. A Microsoft Office Live Workspace was set up for us to use, and everyone was able to proof and edit the proposal as they saw fit.
I began researching white paper layouts and have several sources for potential design considerations. The biggest concern seems to be readability. Since these documents can be quite long, a plain 20 page document would never get read, but if it were broken up with charts and faded background images it should read much more smoothly. So far, from what I can see in the litany of different layouts, is that contrast and adequate use of color are vital in achieving this. A document with graphics and other images that is black/white is at least ten times more difficult to pay attention to than one with color-this allows those graphics to stand out and draw the eyes away from the huge wall of text.
re: Group 7: Individual 1
There are some good specifics in this, but you'll want to explicate statements such as "After everyone sent out their top three" and "I began researching white paper layouts and have several sources for potential design considerations." What were your top three? What sources did you find and what did you take from them? Concrete contributions should be your focus, because they reveal what you individually added to the project. This is important, because your group mates will be reviewing these blogs later as a record of your value to the group.
Also, you don't need the header. I know it's used on the example we provided, but that was an emailed memo. Here it's unnecessary. You also don't need: "The blog post will summarize what has been done this week for the white paper project."