The following is a list of criteria that will help you make your design plans the best that they can be.
- Structure your design plans by establishing the goals of the corresponding text through its statement of purpose (sense of purpose, audience, context) and how it will accomplish them (strategies, medium, arrangement). Then discuss the testing process (if appropriate). Look at pages 52-54 of Compose, Design, Advocate "Laying Out a Design Plan" 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 the text's physical, economic, political, and ethical contexts should be specific. Where and how will your audience encounter the text? What economic and political issues are relevant? How will your text impact the rights, values, and well-being of others? The more information you can provide about context, the stronger the evidence for your production choices will be, because you will be designing to fit a defined situation. Look at pages 46 and 47 of TCT for more information about contexts.
- Remember that your design plans should reflect how the text functions in its finished state. It should not speculate about what the text should or might do.
- A design plan is a whole document, not a collection of parts. Our drafts often start as lists of parts (purpose, audience, context, strategies, medium, arrangement, testing), but final design plans should be narratives with an intro, body, and conclusion. 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 "Laying Out a Design Plan" 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 text uses a particular color scheme or that it is arranged in a certain way unless you demonstrate how these features help the text accomplish its goals.