Years of high school and junior college education in various fields had created a good writer. This assignment was the first to test me as a communicator.

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Find a news article, take out all the images and headlines, then reorganize all the text into a random assortment of text that does not flow or make any logical sense. That jumbled mess of a document was what I received and was asked to make a functional piece again.

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The exercise was simple on the surface. However, before you can fix an article’s layout and organization, you need to understand its meaning. A lot of time was spent reading and rereading the text, finding similarities in the meaning and reorganizing paragraphs into categories. Once that was done, the next task was to create a design and layout.

Later in my Technical Communications career I might have had theory and concepts to apply to the document. I could have applied Gestalt’s Principles of Design or created a sense of visual hierarchy with captions of different font size and boldness. Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop could have been used to touch up the visuals and make the design pop. Instead, Microsoft Word was used, and I did what came intuitively for the layout.

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The final product is a cohesive digital media style article that obeys many of the principles of document design anyways. It utilizes the principles of proximity, alignment, and visual hierarchy. The document is balanced both vertically and horizontally and has a consistent color theme. Best of all, it applies all these principles before I even knew what they were. This document shows me as a Technical Communicator in my most raw and most intuitive form.