Graphic Design - Adobe Illustrator (Yearbook)
I. Course Description: In this 21st century, cross curricular, project-based class, students work collaboratively by using technology such as digital cameras, photo editing software and Adobe InDesign or online design software to digitally produce a yearbook. Students use writing skills, communication skills and creativity to tell the story of the school community and peers in an engaging way. Students demonstrate knowledge of graphic design and think creatively when organizing information within the yearbook. In this college and career ready course, students think critically to meet deadlines, track to goals and utilize multimedia to market and disseminate information that aligns with and models an actual business. Students will use all of their academic skills in a real-world context. Writing, design, business, technology and communication combine for a uniquely beneficial class that yields skills necessary for success in college and beyond.
II. Yearbook and 21st Century Skills
Learning and Thinking Skills
As much as students need to learn academic content, they also need to know how to keep learning — and make effective and innovative use of what they know — throughout their lives.
Collaboration
- Exercise flexibility and willingness to be helpful in making necessary compromises to accomplish a common goal.
- Assume shared responsibility for collaborative work and value the individual contributions made by each team member.
- Expressing thoughts for entertaining, persuading or informing
- Printed, digital, and visual texts
- Learning experiences that require depth and complexity of thinking as they analyze, infer, compare, reason, interpret, synthesize and evaluate.
- Making real-world connections to learning.
- Innovation, original ideas and risk-taking.
- Examine and evaluate ideas from different perspectives, think in new directions and synthesize information in useful ways.
- Leadership
- Ethics
- Accountability on time.
- Adaptability
- Problems arise that need to be solved by being flexible about the solutions.
- Yearbook staffers need to compromise when developing a theme, creating layouts that share the theme and implementing marketing strategies.
- A yearbook, which is collaborative in its end product, cannot be made without the individual contributions of many people.
Communication Skills
- Ideally, every page in the yearbook will inform the school community about the clubs, activities and sports available to students as well as providing an entertaining presentation of the interests of the student body at this point in time.
- A yearbook is a printed medium that communicates visually through photographs, graphics and text and has digital tie-ins with ReplayIt, Time Capsule and the Field Kit.
Critical Thinking
- Students are critical thinkers as they analyze a layout to determine if it has good coverage, compare consistency from spread to spread or evaluate how they are tracking to deadlines or sales goals.
- Students on the yearbook staff are running a business. Using their academic knowledge and teamwork, they are creating a product that a huge percentage of their peers will purchase.
Creative Thinking
- Not only do students need to think creatively to create layouts and take photos, but they also need to solve problems by thinking in divergent ways.
- The creation of a yearbook is a team effort. Students need to be able to examine and evaluate many different possibilities for design, writing and problem solving by researching and brainstorming.
ICT Literacy
Information and communications technology (ICT) literacy is the ability to use technology to develop 21st century content knowledge and skills in support of 21st century teaching and learning.When students create a yearbook, they are using computers, digital cameras, photo editing software and design software as well as the Internet and a safe social networking site known as ReplayIt.
Life Skills
Good teachers have always incorporated life skills into their pedagogy. The challenge today is to incorporate these essential skills into schools deliberately, strategically and broadly.
Life Skills Include
- Editors show leadership in a standard sense, but staffers show leadership in their ability to work cooperatively with the team, volunteer for extra responsibility and meet deadlines.
- Yearbook students learn journalistic ethics and photographic ethics as well as interpersonal ethics in the way they interact with their fellow staffers, collect yearbook and ad sales money, etc.
- Yearbook students are accountable to their fellow staffers to meet deadlines and to their peers at large in making a high-quality book that will arrive
- Students will be able to identify the periods in art history including different cultures and use historical techniques as stimulus for their own artwork and evaluate technical proficiency.
- Students will understand the influence that art has on society through the ages.
- Students will be able to identify periods in graphic styles and understand the terminology used in graphic design.
- Students will be able to analyze the effects of technology on art.
- Students will have mastered the skills of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign and produce a body of artwork.
- Students will create a portfolio for college, trade school or a work related field demonstrating the elements of art and principles of design.
- Identify styles, materials and fundamentals elements of art and principles of design though art history.
- Sketch ideas based on a theme and use technology to execute an original publication using the elements of art and principles of design.
- Students will learn how to participate in a positive critique of work.
VI. Major Course Projects and Instructional Activities:
1. Elements of art and principles of design
2. Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Bridge
3. Layout Design
4. Caption Writing
5. Story Writing
6. Photography
7. Marketing
8. Typography
9. Graphic Design
10. Photo Editing
11. Desktop Publishing
12. Video Editing
13. Interviewing
14. Business Advertisements
15. Team Building
V. Course Assessment Plan and Grading Plan
1. Rubrics
2. Tests
3. Projects
4. Self Evaluation
5. Group Evaluation
6. Written Report
7. Critiques
Grading Scale:
A 90-100
B 80-89
C 70-79
D 65-69
F 64 and below