Assessment Essay

   
            For our project, we decided to use a lot of visuals to support our claim. We have provided many different pictures that represent the point we are trying to make with our project. They provide evidence that Social Media Depression is something felt by people all over the world and we are not the only people concerned about it. While we have copious amounts of visuals to support our claim, we also have a small amount of text on our page as well. This just adds an extra element to our page that the presence of the pictures could not provide.

            Our visual argument appeals directly to our targeted audience because they are all expressing depression and/or sadness from social media sites, specifically Facebook. They pictures we have provided on our page appeal most directly to people who use social media on a regular basis and who use it for publicizing personal information. This was our targeted audience from the beginning of our project. The pictures on our page are meant to catch the attention of social media users and persuade them to be cautious when using social media so regularly.

            Our design plan was simple, yet appropriate. As previously stated, we used many different visuals, including a slideshow of pictures, a YouTube video, and a flyer. These things are aesthetically pleasing and inviting so people will be intrigued and convinced to look/read more on our page. We used dark colors to represent a dark topic. This seemed appropriate because the topic of Social Media Depression, or any depression, is serious and solemn. It should be taken seriously and we did not think any bright colors would have represented that. Our goal is to appeal to our audience’s emotional side, therefore the dark colors make sense in representing that. We added the quote as a light-hearted, yet supportive way to back-up our claim.

            I believe that our advocacy appeals the most to pathos. Our photo slideshow displays images that captures our viewers’ attention and draws them in emotionally. They may relate to some of the photos displayed and it may make them think of how Facebook and other social media have caused them sadness in some ways. Most of the pictures are sad looking. The banner displayed on the main page is a big picture with the Facebook logo where the o’s are made into eyes and a face that is crying. Even the sarcastic pictures like the “forever alone” picture may grab the attention in a positive way at first but then makes people relate and feel sad. They might think that if nobody comments or likes their statuses or pictures than they are just like the character itself.

            Our page itself has very dark and ominous feel. This is how our ethos is reflected. Dark colors portray sadness and depression so we were trying to show that. The type itself is a serif font that would be found on many social media sites. The Facebook logo itself is presented many times in its same font. We didn’t try to change the feeling of being on a social media site.

            For logos, we believe that our readers can easily manipulate through our advocacy site to get the point. We didn’t try to fill our visual up with a bunch of articles and facts. We tried to be very blunt and clear that social media can be linked to depression and the issue is become more and more apparent. The video we posted from Fox News itself was a way to show our readers that there is evidence that back up these claims. This advocacy is not just based on a feeling that some people are having; there have been studies done and now the research is starting to show more and more of the effects social media sites can have on people. Our logos is shown through our video, our picture slideshow, and the flyer that we created as an extra little visual. Our flyer is advertising for a group that meets and discusses real stories and feelings regarding social media and depression. We wanted to show how it is a problem instead of trying to directly tell our readers what is happening.

            The most challenging part of composing our visual was trying to choose what we wanted to put up. We had a lot of information we could have used, but we didn’t want to overwhelm our readers. We wanted to keep it clean and simple and gain attention fast. We think it was challenging because we did have so many options for our visual. We believe that we ended up keeping our visual simple though. We included a short news video, a fake flyer advertising for people to come out and talk about social media depression at a meeting, and we made a picture slideshow of some of the images we thought could get our message across and get people to relate. When younger readers are browsing they don’t want to have to read a long article. They want to get the point fast and we have to grab their attention first. We thought about doing a anonymous poll to get people’s bad experiences with Facebook or some other type of social media but we ended up not going with that idea because we wanted to get our point through images instead. I think that our most effective aspect of our project is our news video. It states some facts and shows the growing concern over this matter.

            When it comes to project management we think we did very well. We are two very relaxed partners. We don’t stress over if the other is procrastinating and we relied on each other to produce quality work on time. We believe we did just that. We realized that splitting up the work was crucial to this project. If one of us didn’t understand something we helped each other out. We got our work done by the deadlines and came up with a pretty awesome advocacy page.