School diary cover
Jamie and Matt's diary covers
(Click images to enlarge)
Jamie Hanifin and Matt Heywood
Mountainview High School
Information Management, Year 11
Teacher: Tricia Winter
To promote Mountainview High School to the wider community, Jamie Hanifin and Matt Heywood were asked to produce a cover for the school diary that reflected a student perspective of school life for their Year 11 Information Management class. This was an important school publication, and in the project brief teacher Tricia Winter encouraged developing unique covers that reflected elements of life at the school that had a personal resonance for each student.
Matt and Jaime began by planning their projects to make the most of their time and resources, producing Gantt and flow charts to carefully designate the time and resources required for each component. Allocating time for using the school computers was particularly important as both students had limited internet and software access at home.
With the planning in place, the students began brainstorming ideas for the cover that reflected the elements of the school they felt were of the most importance. For Jaime this included ideas such as support, scenery, and whanau, while Matt identified sport, leadership, and friendship as most relevant to his experience of life at the school.
The students then examined these ideas for their visual potential, considering what elements would represent the school best and what would translate most successfully to a school diary cover.
Research and development was a key part of the assessment and both Jamie and Matt sought advice and inspiration from a variety of sources including professional technologists, the internet, and local publications. The students conducted close analysis of previous school diary covers, existing advertisements, brochures, and posters to find both inspiration for their own work and to identify design elements such as colour, font, and layout that they felt were effective.
Jamie's cover mock-ups PDF
download (PDF file, 731kb)
Documentation was an important part of the project's assessment, so all research was recorded in an ongoing bibliography where the students rated each resource according to its effectiveness. The students also kept a visual diary of their design process and a daily log of their Technological Practice, outlining their goal for the day, what they achieved, and the problems that arose. This documentation proved invaluable during regular conferences with Tricia, where Jaime and Matt gained feedback and advice on what elements were working and what steps needed to be taken to move to the next stage of development.
The students then narrowed down their ideas to create three design briefs, with cover mock-ups to give an idea of the final design. Each mock-up was rated with pros and cons to find the cover that best expressed the student's personal ideas and represented the school in a visually effective manner.
Once a single design was chosen, the students were asked to choose what they thought was the best software program to produce their final design. Despite their lack of experience, Matt and Jaime taught themselves to use CorelDRAW in order to produce an outcome of a high enough quality to represent the school.
"To meet all the specifications of the brief, I avoided the use of manipulated clip art and used design programs like CorelDRAW and Adobe Photoshop to create images specific to Mountainview in my diary cover," explains Jamie.
Both students are proud of their final design and feel that it represents their own ideas well.
"Even though I had to change a few things from my initial sketches I feel it made the final design look better and I'm happy with how it turned out," says Matt. "I have achieved what I set out to do because it stands out and clearly represents everything that makes up Mountainview for me."
Jamie also had to do some serious problem-solving and editing of her initial ideas to come up with the best outcome. "Even though I have come across a lot of problems and constraints in this assessment I have been able to find a good solution to most of them. I have put a lot of time and effort into this project but feel that I have learnt a lot and produced something I'm really proud of."
Teacher comment
As an educator, it is truly humbling to see the quality of the work Matt and Jamie have produced, and I am very proud of them. Despite having little or no experience with Technology or the technological process, both students showed meticulous planning, working within the key milestones they identified to produce designs of a very high quality. Even though they were unfamiliar with many elements of this project, such as the software, their perseverance paid off and the extensive research carried out by both students ensured their covers clearly showed their individual take on what the school represented to them.
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