1. What is your essential question? What is the best answer to your question and why?
- My essential question is "What is most important in creating a graphic design for an advertisement to persuade teens to make a purchase?" Throughout the past few months, I have been focusing on three answers that I felt I could best support with solid evidence. My three answers are understanding the teenagers and their needs, implementing a strategy that best suits the audience and product, and understanding the relevance of things in a design. Of these three answers, my best answer is to understand the teens and their needs because without this step, the strategies and the relevancy of things in the design won't matter since it doesn't apply to anyone specifically.
2. What process did you take to arrive at this answer?
- I began my senior topic wanting to learn the process of creating designs, however, I wanted to do more with it. I wanted to learn how to apply it to certain situations and as I got further into research, I began to notice how much it tied into advertising. After I incorporated advertisement into my EQ, I still felt that it was too general. I wanted to narrow it down to a specific group of audience and since I'm a teen, I felt that I should focus on teens so that I could have a better understanding on what people my age look for in a design. And after a couple of drafts, I arrived at my final EQ, "What is most important in creating a graphic for an advertisement to persuade teens to make a purchase?"
- Some of the potential answers are understanding the teens and their needs, implementing a strategy that best suits the audience and product, and understanding the relevancy of things in a design.
- Although I felt that all three answers were useful, my best answer is understanding the teens and their needs. Without this step, the design would have no direction and the strategies and the actual design itself would have no purpose.
3. What problems did you face? How did you resolve them?
- Mentorship was by far the most difficult problem that I faced whether it was finding an actual mentor or being able to get there. However, when I found a mentor in Glendora, I was determined to get there to complete my hours consistently so I took time out of elective to take the bus to get there.
- Research was also a major issue. As I mentioned before, I wanted my EQ to be as specific as possible. This created an issue when I did research because not many articles dealt specifically with what I was dealing with. I found my way around this by finding articles that focused on graphic design, articles that focused on advertisements, and articles about teen's attitude towards it and related them together. I also used sources like my mentor Lydia Korinko and Paul Huang.
4. What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?
- Paul Huang is like my second mentor. He has helped me with answering my EQ by our weekly lessons and has given me more valuable/relevant information than any other source.
- AIGA, the professional association for design was a major source that helped me find research and different resources. It lead me to different designers' portfolio and contact information as well as articles on graphic design itself that were relevant to my answers.
5. What is your product and why?
- As a result of these past 9 months of research and hands on experience, I've improved my communication skills. I've shown this through my interviews and my artwork. In my recent interviews, I have shown progress in communication by the depth of my interviews. Paul has recognized this and has commended me for it by saying "past students have interviewed me but your questions are by far my favorite because it is so well thought out." I have also shown this through art because my answers focus on the thought process of the audience when they see advertisements so that I could better communicate with them through graphic designs.
