Week 9 Reflection

Coming back from spring break to an almost-finished project feels pretty nice. We were working on our direct mailers for a few weeks before break, so thankfully there wasn’t a whole lot of work left to do in order to wrap things up. These direct mailers were meant to serve as promotional materials for the University of Oklahoma and were supposed to be geared toward certain stakeholders.

Over the course of this project, we were asked to identify and prioritize stakeholders, design with these stakeholders mind, and complete multiple drafts of front-and-back designs.

Though I was a little leery of the prioritizing stakeholders matrix, I do think it was helpful to go through the steps and complete one. I chose high school seniors (17-18 years old) in Oklahoma who would be second generation OU graduates looking for places to apply as my main stakeholder. The main call to action, then, was for these students to submit an application to the University of Oklahoma. This stakeholder provided a natural segue to parents/alumni becoming my second stakeholder. From here, I designed.

If you compare my previous post to this post, you’ll notice that the fronts of my direct mailers did not change much from draft to draft. I made a few minor placement/spacing changes, but nothing super noticeable. The backs of my direct mailers were what I thought needed work, so I mostly worked on those. The final products are below.

I didn’t have any adverse reaction to this assignment. As I mentioned before, the stakeholder matrix did frustrate me a little bit but other than that, I don’t feel like I faced any real snags this time around. I think I’m getting slightly more calm about everything, which is good. This newfound calmness is due in part to the fact that I do feel myself becoming more confident in my ability to use the tools provided to meet expectation.

I did notice differences between Photoshop and InDesign, but it’s been a while since I worked in InDesign and I couldn’t tell you what those differences were right now. I feel like I’ll enjoy using both programs once I don’t have to look up how to do every other thing I want to do. I think any preference between the two would be based on the type of project I was working on.