Design & Color – Reverse Engineer Post

Reverse Engineer Post

A Reverse Engineer Post demonstrates your knowledge of why a design is good/effective. You will choose professionally produced materials and write a blog post analyzing them. Please make sure that you use BYU-Idaho appropriate materials to analyze. Your understanding will be shown through a combination of writing and "draw overs." A "draw over" is when you take an original design and use a program like Photoshop to draw over top of it. This allows you to visually show what you are writing about. Watch this video which demonstrates how to create a draw over: Draw Over Instructions.

Watch the following video for a walkthrough on how to setup a blog post for a Reverse Engineer Post: Blog Post Creation

Content Specifics

Your blog post should include the following:

  • Design:
    Find a design to critique, which meets the following requirements:

    • BYU-Idaho appropriate (reach out to your instructor if you have questions).
    • Demonstrates good use of design principles and color.
    • Includes some text.
  • Introduction:
    Write an introduction to your blog post. Include …

    • the unaltered original design.
    • text giving attribution to the designer, and a link to where the original design was found. If the designer cannot be identified, provide as much information about the organization, individual, or subject that is depicted in the design.
    • other relevant information about the designer, design, or general appeal.
  • Analysis:
    Create draw overs and write paragraphs explaining how the designer utilized the following (one draw over and paragraph for each):

    • contrast
    • repetition
    • alignment
    • proximity
    • color
  • Conclusion:
    Write a brief description of how the above principles contribute to the overall design.

General Blog Post Requirements

Watch the following video that runs you through these requirements and how to actually setup a blog post: Blog Post Creation

  • Title: The title should be written as a blog post title. Choose something engaging and descriptive. Avoid using titles like "Reverse Engineer Post by John Doe"
  • Tags: You should create many tags related to the topics you're discussing in your article. These tags should be keyword rich, meaning they are words that people would use to search for an article with this content. You should have at least 3 tags.
  • Categories: Choose the "reverse engineer" category as well as all other appropriate categories related to your content.
  • Featured Image: Some themes don't allow you to set a featured image. When you do have a theme that allows it you will want to set one. The featured image will show up at the top of the summary text in the blog. The featured image should be web optimized, enticing and accurately portray what the reader should expect from the blog post.
  • Images: Make sure to only upload web optimized images (jpgs or pngs). Do NOT use PDFs, .AIs or other file types not conducive to a good user experience. Typically, larger images that do not have to be clicked on to see them are a much better way to go than thumbnails. You may choose to take a screenshot of the graphic you're analyzing and do several "draw overs" to visually show what you're describing in text.
  • Text: You should type your text into the text box. In other words, do not post an image of a paragraph of text. The search engines cannot read images and won't know what you're saying (bad SEO).

 

Submission

Read the following instructions, and watch this video to help you understand how to submit your work: PDF and Link Submission Video

  1. Create your post on your class WordPress blog.
  2. Save your post as a PDF that contains all the content of the post. An easy way of saving your post as a PDF is to use the Web to PDF Converter at Web2pdfconvert.com. After you create the PDF you will want to check to see if it contains all the images and text from your blog post. If the Web2pdf converter doesn't work, you can also try one of these 5 other methods.
  3. Upload the PDF to the assignment submission page.
  4. Insert the direct link to your blog post in the text box that appears after uploading your PDF (example link to your blog post: https://jakespencer.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/king-kong-of-reverse-engineer-posts/).

Example

Check out these student examples: