Appropriate Advert

For your final project, you will create a multimodal text, i.e., a text that uses at least two modal elements (visual, aural, linguistic, spatial, gestural). Your final project will be to create an advertisement for a product or service. Whatever you choose to advertise (you may select an existing product/service or create your own fictitious one), it will have an audience, a message, and its purpose will be to sell the product/service to your audience.

We have looked at several ads over the past few weeks, and up to this point we have described and analyzed them. For this project, you will reverse the process of what you have been doing as you plan to create a multimodal text.

For your project, do the following:

1) Identify your target audience;
2) Identify the purpose of your text (to sell soap, to grow subscriptions, to solicit donations, etc.)
3) Decide on the message you will send that conveys information people need to know, and that will persuade your audience to do whatever it is you want them to do.

Once you have made these determinations (examined your rhetorical situation), then do the following:

4) Determine how is the best way to reach your audience (what genre—a video, a static ad, a radio commercial, etc); this will depend on your audience, e.g, 90 years old people are going to see your denture cream video on YouTube, and also on your product/service, e.g., if you are selling a painting of mountains, it would be better to use a genre that allows you to use visual modal elements;
5) Then determine, based on your genre, how you may combine modal elements to convey the necessary information so that they may act, and that may also work to persuade your audience to act
6) Also determine, based on your genre, how you may use design elements to convey the necessary information so that they may act, and that may also work to persuade your audience to act

In short, you need to plan how you will use modal and design elements to produce a multimodal text for your audience.

Written Assignment:

Write a 2-3 pages assignment that discusses the following:

Describe some of the modal/design choices you made and implemented into your project and explain why you made those choices and how you think they work to convey necessary information and persuade your audience. For example, “I chose to use a dark negative fill behind bright pink text to produce contrast and make the words easy to see and read. I chose the pink color for the text also because it appeals to young children who like the Barbie movie.” OR “I used frames and borders around the edges of this text to give it an official look. The borders help to organize and frame the important information, and the smaller, informational text lies at the bottom and outside of the border. I think by making the ad look official, it gives the ad some ethos.”

Also describe any difficulty you had with the technology you used and/or with designing and drafting your text. And also explain what you did to overcome these difficulties. For example, “I could not figure out how to save the project as a jpg, my program kept saving it as a project file. So, I found a video on YouTube that showed me how to covert this kind of project file to .jpg.”

Lastly, if you were asked to produce another text like the one you did for this project, what would you do differently next time.

Deliverables:

Multimodal text
Written Assignment