Selection Project

This week's assignment asked us to consider "selection", which is "the mind's tendency to pay attention to what is dominant in an image" (Lohr, 2008, p. 116). In graphic design, we want to make the message as clear as possible. By carefully applying contrast to type, colors, space and depth, we facilitate the selection process, creating figure-ground distinction (Lohr, 2008, p. 116).

As with last the few weeks' graphics, this will be used as part of my web tutorial on prepositions. For high-school students, I want to provide enough visual interest that the image doesn't seem too boring or elementary, but I also don't want to overwhelm them with extraneous details. As beginning Spanish students, they need linguistic support for the objects in the picture (in this case, animals), so that they can immediately use the prepositions from this lesson.

In this graphic, I created figure-ground distinction with contrasting shapes and colors. It is easy to see the arrangement of various animal habitats, as well as the pedestrian paths that connect them. Landmarks and animals are clearly labeled with bold icons and Spanish names. This should help students verbalize spatial relationships while reducing cognitive load. As Lohr (2008) comments on page 108, "the goal of most performance support environments is to help the learner perform a task, not figure out what the task is". 

My husband had positive feedback about this image. His only concern was that students will try to apply prepositions like "right" and "left" to this map, and without having a perspective/orientation, it will be confusing or meaningless. I assured him that I was planning on using "drop-down" menus to assess this graphic, and it will focus on relationships like "next to", "near", "between", and "facing". Last week's graphic (the fruit stand) will provide practice opportunities for prepositions like "to the left of", "to the right of", "above", and "below". So once that was cleared up, he said the graphic was very pleasing and easy to use. Based on this, I don't plan any updates at this time.

Lohr, L.L. (2008). Creating graphics for learning and performance: Lessons in visual literacy (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Clip art was created by the following artists, and used with permission: Francesco_Rollandin, horse50, johnny-automatic, Kaz, laobc, molumen, nicubunu, Rones, and Savanaprice.