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Context

I completed this project for my PWR 217: Professional Writing Technologies class in the fall of 2019. Throughout the semester, each person in the class chose one topic that interested them and focused all six of their unit projects around that area. I chose bullet journaling as my topic because aside from its being my favorite hobby, it has become very popular on social media over the last few years, and many people I know have heard of the practice but want to know more about the different ways in which it can be done before they decide if they want to start. Our fifth unit, “Page Layout,” focused on the functions and uses of Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, and the unit project deliverables consisted of a single-page document using Illustrator and a multi-page document using InDesign (the genre for each deliverable was the student’s choice). This design sample is the latter part of that unit project.

Rhetorical Decisions 

     I decided to make a mini-magazine for my unit project because bullet journaling was a topic for which the genre of a crafting/lifestyle magazine seemed appropriate—bullet journaling is essentially an artistic way of organizing one’s life. I used a preset template on InDesign and photos from Pinterest to create a layout that could follow a step-by-step organization because I wanted the magazine to appeal to a wide audience with varying levels of knowledge about bullet journaling—a reader could either go through the magazine cover to cover or only focus on the sections they wanted to learn more about. 

    I included a hashtag in the title because I wanted to allude to the online-trend aspect of the craft while peaking people’s interest about what exactly #bujo is and continued the internet theme in my definition section by pulling quotes from various websites. I formatted the quiz to reduce the possibility of biased results (reading ahead is more difficult when the results are based on point totals than on choosing all the answers marked with the same letter). My final article was adapted from a blog post I wrote for a previous unit project in the same class, but I condensed it to fit on two pages with photos and subheadings to make skimming easier. I kept the preset color scheme from the template because I thought it could evoke the idea of crafting, and I made the font as readable as possible using contrast and a column arrangement.

Reflection

    The unit projects in PWR 217 were intended to give us a taste of working with each program or writing technology while allowing us to think critically about our genre and design choices, and I think this mini-mag demonstrates an accomplishment of both of these goals. My professor especially gave good feedback on my quiz format, and that page was both the most fun and the most challenging to make based on the format. Additionally, I believe the entire mini-mag could easily be expanded upon or placed within a larger context, which has shown me the flexibility of topical writing and design.