ENG 317 Designing Web Communications
Spring 2014, Tompkins 109, 8:05—8:55a
Instructor: Keon Pettiway, MFA
Email: kmpettiw[at]ncsu.edu
Office Hours: MWF 9—10a, Ricks Hall Addition
Course Description: Fundamentally, ENG 317 Designing Web Communication is a studio-based, humanities course in the layout, design, and composition of web-based communication. Students will learn to analyze audiences and their uses of information in order to plan, compose, and critically evaluate web-based communication. Students will acquire skill with HTML coding, screen design, and multimedia authoring and will apply those skills to the composition of a variety of web texts (i.e. websites). Course work will require students to become proficient with commercially available HTML and photoeditors. As part of a humanistic inquiry, students will examine and interpret the human dimensions of technology and culture through an integrated rhetorical design theory and practice of designing web communication. In particular, students will investigate the intersection of rhetoric in digital environments where designers encounter matters such as gender, race, and identity.
Course Objectives: At the end of this course, students should be proficient with HTML, CSS, and visual interface design, as well as use rhetorical and cultural sensitivity when designing across cultures by being able to do the following:
- apply rhetorical design concepts to web communication;
- understand web communication within larger contexts of technology, culture, and design;
- produce a web site from the planning to production of a visual interface;
- develop proficiency of common authoring tools for web design production;
- demonstrate design literacy of typography, hierarchy, layout, and form for screen design;
- apply visual and usability analysis to evaluate web communications