Justification Paper Jeanne Searfoorce Boise State University

Sophisticated Smokers

I created this image for my Health Education Lesson which focuses on Smoking. This part of the curriculum deals with smoking. The audience is middle school students in grades six through eight and range in age from 10 to 14 years old. Many of these students are reading at a level lower than their grade level. This image is the third version of my image for this week. For the first image, I wanted to use cigarettes in a bar graph to represent the number of deaths related to smoking cigarettes. This image showed only a small part of the cigarette and looked really weird. In the second image, I used the same data with a pie chart. I used the cigarettes as the lines to separate the different pie pieces. This image fell flat and was ineffective in my eyes. I waited 24 hours and took one final look at the assignment and at chapter five. Chapter five had the biggest impact on my design. I liked the irony and unique use of images and wanted to try to incorporate these ideas into my image. I thought that humor would evoke an unexpected reaction about smoking. Most students hear, Dont smoke. This images makes the student think about how they look smoking and how people look smoking. With a image driven society such as ours, this image may be discussed for a while after the students have seen it. Color may not be necessary. (Lohr, 269) Chose colors that help the user see the big picture (gestalt). (Lohr, 269). I wanted the audience to notice the smoking animals and not the background. For this reason, I made the background white. I showed the image to my father who used to be a smoker. He also appreciates comedy. He thought it was funny. I am not sure how effective it will be but I wanted to design something fun. I will make changes based on the user comments.

Lohr, L. (2008). Creating graphics for learning and performance: Lessons in visual literacy (pp. 269). Columbus, Ohio: Pearson.

Can She Have Another Round? I created this image for my Health Education Lesson which focuses on Drugs. This part of the curriculum deals with Alcohol. The audience is middle school students in grades six through eight and range in age from 10 to 14 years old. Many of these students are reading at a level lower than their grade level. While many of these students have a considerable amount of knowledge about drugs, I am not sure how many students know that alcohol is a drug. I am also not sure if the students understand the real affects (mental, physical and emotional) of drinking alcohol to excess. When I first started thinking about introducing the alcohol unit, I wanted it to look and feel different from the street and prescription drug portion of my lesson unit. One reason is that I wanted to divert from dark feeling the Meth image invokes. Many kids may not be interested in trying hard drugs but would be interested in trying alcohol because it is not illegal to purchase alcohol, unless you are under the age of 21. Second, the physical changes from consuming alcohol are not as apparent. However, they are still real and life changing. Third, I wanted to challenge my design skills by not relying on the same exact template for each image. Give your subconscious a chance by putting the idea away and allowing your mind to work on the problem without pressure. (Lohr, 77) When I began my image design, I wanted to use the silhouettes of a male and female to remove the specific image of a particular type of person who chooses to drink alcohol underage. Second, I wanted the students to focus on the glasses of beer and how many glasses of beer would make a 120 pound person intoxicated. Third, I used a merry go round for a background because its a fun ride and when it ends, the ride and the music both slow down (like an intoxicated person). In many ways like consuming alcohol, you may want to go for another ride (or have another drink) but you may be dizzy and slightly out of sorts (similar to being intoxicated). Finally, I used the red color (which I saw on the website that used on bloodalcoholcalculator.org) because it refers directly to the blood in blood alcohol level and it also provides a stark contrast to the black and white background.

Contrast draws your eye into a page, it pulls you in. Contrasting elements guide your eyes around the page, create a heirarchy of information, and enable you to skim thought the vast array of information and pick out what you need. (Williams and Tollett, 126). In my original version, I focused on both male and female alcohol consumption. While I will include both in my final lesson plan, I wanted to submit the female image for the project because the carousel seems to have a more feminine feel. For the male image, I need find an image that conveys the same message but with a more masculine tone. My title for the theme is, The music has stopped, so should you. There are a few meanings to this phrase. First, it relates directly to the carousel. When the carousel ride is over, the music stops. Like with a party, when the music stops, the party is over. Furthermore, this relates directly to consuming alcohol. One should stop drinking alcohol, especially one who is underage. The second line, Think before you drink, relates to making good choices. Drinking alcohol may seem like a fun ride, but it will come to an end and possibly it will not be as fun while you were consuming the alcohol. Related items are close in proximity. (Lohr, 84) This text relates to how close the female image is to the six glasses she consumes. I want the students to understand that one person can consume this amount of alcohol and the size of the beer glasses is in proportion to the speed the individual will become intoxicated drinking six beers in one hour. The image of the glasses of beer being consumed every ten minutes is to visually express how dangerous alcohol can be to consume in a short amount of time by actually seeing how it appears to drink one alcoholic drink every ten minutes. I tried to use the beer from the glasses to outline the figure, but it just did not come out as I had envisioned in my head. Finally, I divided the page in half. One half shows the amount of time the female consumed the beer while the other directly relates the beer consumption to her. The images on the left are placed far to the left to a.)place emphases and b.) so the image in he background can add to the mood of the image. The images on the right proportionally centered in a straight line. This was done as a play on images because the female could not walk a straight line after consuming this many beverages. I emailed my Dad the image. There were size adjustments that needed to be made and some typos that needed to be corrected. I will wait to make further corrections after it is reviewed in moodle.

Lohr, L. (2008). Creating graphics for learning and performance: Lessons in visual literacy (pp. 77, 79, 84). Columbus, Ohio: Pearson. Williams, R & Tollett, J. (2006. The Non-Designers Web Book (pp. 126). Berkley, California: Peachpit Press.

I Always Dress My Best I always try to incorporate humor into my teaching style. By humor, I am referring to finding things that are sincerely humorous instead of just poking fun at someone (which I dont find funny at all). After I read the text, I found this lesson a personal challenge. Each week, I force myself to get out of my comfort zone and to really examine the text and the message that is being conveyed. This week, the word chunking stood out to me. In this lesson, I am focusing on why students should not drink alcohol to excess. My final lesson is three parts: drugs, drinking and smoking. The idea of statistics entered my brain and I conducted some research. Bored. Yes, the numbers are meaningful (but not if you are in middle school). I looked online to relate parts of the brain to drinking alcohol to excess. Bored. The images just did not show all seven areas of the brain I wanted to discuss. They focus on the five main parts of the brain. Finally, I started thinking about mini-fridges. Yes, those darling little cold boxes in dorm rooms across America. Ah, that seemed like a great idea except my idea would get me into trouble with one fabulous outfit with uberstylish mini-fridges. Then, I thought about showing how much alcohol one could fit into a little fridge. Okay, now this was starting to get me back on track, but at a very slow pace. Finally, I focused on the alcohol itself, particularly beer (as it seems that many underage drinkers prefer the cool drink). Then, it popped into my head,Put a costume on the beer. Low and behold, I found a penguin costume and dressed up my bottle of beer. Penguins like the cold. The beer looks cold. (This was honestly a happy coincidence.) The lime added some character. The writers wheel on page 159 really grabbed my eye and is what jump started my ideas about using different shades of gray. The wheel shows the big picture of writing as a circular shape that makes an immediately apparent that writing is a cyclical process. The pie-shaped wedges show the individual components that make up writing.

Students can thus easily envision the writing process as the sum of individual steps. (Lohr, 158) My goal in following this idea was that dressing up a beer bottle is ridiculous. Drinking too much alcohol underage is ridiculous. Dont be ridiculous. I also wanted to add some text in blocks so it would stand out. While black is not gray, white and black blend to create gray. I felt that addressing the students with humor before the less interesting facts will help them learn the important parts of underage drinking while having lighter, laughable moments at the appropriate times. My Dad and I laugh a lot at the same things. He really enjoyed the image. I will make further changes based on other opinions. Lohr, L. (2008). Creating graphics for learning and performance: Lessons in visual literacy (pp. 158). Columbus, Ohio: Pearson. Death Rhymes with Meth I created this image for my Health Education Lesson which focuses on Drugs. The audience is middle school students in grades six through eight and range in age from 10 to 14 years old. Many of these students are reading at a level lower than their grade level. While many of these students have a considerable amount of knowledge about drugs, many do no know the real affects (mental, physical and emotional) of using drugs in the long and short term. Also, meth was once a drug popular in the suburbs and has slowly moved into the urban drug scene. Since I teach in an urban setting, I thought that incorporating a focus on meth is important because of its devastating effects. Many of the students I teach have a desensitized reality. This lack of sensitivity is caused by several things including the environment in which they live. Other factors include graphic content on television and movies and access to content on the Internet. I always use my own reactions to gauge the reactions of children to content I want to present. I want to change their behavior in a positive way without corrupting their morals. This positive change would be the choice to not use drugs. About five years ago, I read a story online regarding a couple who had purchased a house in Bristol, PA. Very dear friends of mine live near Bristol so the story had resonated with me. The couple loved the old house in the hipster area. They purchased the home and moved in and began decorating their

dream home. They started having headaches and other strange physical symptoms. In short, the house they purchased house was used by the owners children (who had inherited the home) as a meth kitchen and drug house. The part of the story that intrigued me was that the meth had penetrated every inch of the house and the removal costs were upwards of $60,000 which was about one third of the purchase price. While I have not followed up with the story, the couple at that point had moved out and were considering their options. There are other houses that are on a national list of meth houses that are not habitable because they are unsafe. By accident, I had stumbled onto meth progression photographs similar to those above. If a house could be deemed inhabitable because of its interaction with meth, how does it affect the person who uses the drug? When I either overheard students discuss drugs or students came to me with questions, I showed them the images. It always caught them off guard and made them think twice. These students had seen more violence and drugs than most kids and even they were shocked by the destruction meth can cause on the body. Color can create moods, add emphasis, attract attention, organize information, and entertain the viewer. It can be subtle, obnoxious, muted, bright, minimal, overdone, harmonious, distracting, beautiful, or ugly. It can scream or whisper, repel or seduce. Color can improve readability or detract from it. (Willams & Tollett, 100) I think my solution will work because it evokes emotion on two levels: the photos are realistic and show that drugs can take your beauty. Second, these people who were once young looked as if they aged exponentially fast. I chose the color to offset the images. While you see the color of the images, you can feel the emotion brought forth by the black and white contrast. The background which is gray with a small amount of color is a combination of the black and white. White Purity, truth, in the Orient used for mourning (Nelson, 1989), bland. Black Depression, sorrow, gloom, death, sensuality, elegance, sophistication, elite, sin, dignity, morbidity, sinister. (Lohr, 270) I also reused the same text for the message that runs down the center of the page and consistently the same. I also decided to use two quotes because I have found that middle school children really like quotes. We are our choices. -Jean Paul Satre Everything has a price. Ann Bishop

Those two phrases verbally express the changes in the photos from left to right. The typeface on the left which identifies the meth users is written in a juvenile type to convey the innocence of the user before they became dependent on the drugs. This descriptor is placed at the top left of the photograph to indicate that they are in the prime of their life before making the decision to use meth. The typeface on the right is aged and distorted which correlates with the age progressed drug users on the right. This descriptor is placed at the bottom left to show that they hit rock bottom after becoming a meth addict. Asymmetry is form that does not have balanced proportions. Asymmetrical balance is achieved when all elements in display are in harmony, but the elements are not symmetrical. (Lohr, 180) This also further reinforces the unbalance in the life of a drug user. I emailed the link to my Dad who was shocked by the physical changes in the meth users. He said that he didnt know that these physical changes would be as visible. I feel that my graphic achieved its goal but I will wait for further feedback to make improvements. Resources: Lohr, L. (2008). Creating graphics for learning and performance: Lessons in visual literacy (pp. 180, 270). Columbus, Ohio: Pearson. Williams, R & Tollett, J. (2006. The Non-Designers Web Book (pp. 100). Berkley, California: Peachpit Press.

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