This was a hard one and most of the ideas came kind of last minute. I had to scramble to come up with what design I wanted and I ended up using a template from Powerpoint. I moved some things around and used a couple icons from the Noun Project website. The topic I focused on, high school writing vs. college writing came about last minute because my original topic was far too broad and not as fleshed out as I wanted it to be. This e-poster was very hastily put together, but I think in my haste, I found some clarity in what I wanted to pursue for my actual CPE. This was a “lobe” of the project that I knew I wouldn’t really get a chance to look at so it was nice to get the opportunity to examine it a bit.

This project was borne out of a desire to think about how my writing has changed going from high school to college. I think even during freshman year of college, I wrote like a high schooler in that I tried to follow the 5-paragraph rule and go with that structure, but I knew that I hadn’t developed my style or voice yet so I was working off a formula to feel safe. My writing wasn’t very good then, but it has developed over the years and with that I have developed my own style through the years.

I really like the idea of visualizing data because it’s much easier on the eyes. The writing process here was easy because I just needed snippets of texts to go with the images so I didn’t have to write paragraphs upon paragraphs. I’ve done projects where I have dealt with designs before. Last semester, for my final project in my James Joyce major authors class, I made a Ulysses-themed magazine in which I did all the designs as well as the layout. I learned how to use Adobe Illustrator and it took a lot of time and effort, but I was extremely proud of the way it turned out. So in this case, this reminded me of that project and it was similar, just on a much smaller scale.

One thing I would do differently in the future is the same ole’, same ole’ “I wish I didn’t wait until the last moment to start this.” It gets increasingly hard to stay on track as the semester goes on, but as long as it gets done, there’s no problem, right?

A path I did not take in creating this piece was trying to summarize my entire CPE in this poster. Rather, I decided to make this into a sidebar, where I talk about something related to my project, but not about the project itself. There are a lot of topics that I know I can include in my research, but the space just isn’t there. The other problem with that could be that my project would seem to be all over the place if I did have the space to integrate all the different “lobes.”