The document discusses interpretive sign designs created by Amy Earls for a class. It includes descriptions of four designs focusing on different design principles: proximity, contrast, color, and type. For each design, Earls explains how she applied the targeted principle and how it improved the design from her previous attempts. She reflects on learning and intentionally applying principles to create better visual designs.

1. Interpretive Sign Designs
Amy Earls
CSE 615
Goal: To show that the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) heals the chronic disorder Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO).
Subgoals:
1. List or illustrate foods that are allowed on SCD.
3. Mention how long it takes to heal.
4. Give hope for a cure to people who don’t have a diagnosis.
Audience: My audience is for people who are not aware that their undiagnosed stomach pain may be the chronic disorder Small Intestine Bacterial
Overgrowth.
Message: The Specific Carbohydrate Diet cures SIBO.

4. Flying fruit—Proximity
For proximity, I made sure that each section that was grouped did belong together. For instance, the title and the website address
seemed to belong in the same group. The website looked lonely without it being grouped, and it seemed to enhance the title because it
gave further explanation of where people can find more information about the diet. I also made sure to separate my text and subtitle
and grouped them close in proximity. The bold subtitle shows that it is separate from the text but that it also belongs. And who
wouldn’t want to try this diet with fruit flying into a delicious-looking smoothie? To me, the picture embodies the title and is very
close in proximity to everything included on the page. I feel like I followed proximity principle in my previous designs, but I was not
intentionally grouping them like I did for this. Because I was intentional, I think that the design turned out better. The font is a little
difficult to read on the page, but this was before I learned the principle of color. (Image came from flickr.com.)

6. Yellow with Girl—Contrast
I loved working on the principle of contrast because I agree with Williams that colors and images really stand out by
contrasting. I used the “hugs” design in this chapter as inspiration because the contrast of the black and the blue title
with the dog picture was memorable and beautiful. With the text, I made sure that it was not completely centered. The
right-aligned looked best to me. I was stumped with what to do on the bottom of the page because it seemed that
there was too much white space with just the text. The radishes pulled all of the colors together nicely and gave a good
contrast from the text. I also thought that making sure that I had horizontal, vertical, and side-ways contrasts
improved my design. (Image came from Clipart.)

8. People Eating—Color
I immediately noticed all of the mistakes I made on my first design, which shows I am learning many great principles! So the first
thing I did to improve my design was re-organized the layout. I changed my text to be left-aligned and decreased the font size (a
little too much). The change I made for color combination was complementary colors, lime green as my accent and violet as my
main. I made both colors shades because the originals were a little hard to look at. I can’t remember for sure if one color should be
a tint because the other is a shade, but these colors still seem to be the opposite shades. Honestly, I think that the change in my
layout made a better improvement than changing the colors. However, the change of colors did make for an improved appearance
because they pop out and complement each other. (Image came from flickr.com.)

10. Cherry—Type
I wanted a design that had the largest type I could manage that was still readable. I chose serif bold
because in the chapter on type, Robin said serif bold looked great on the page large. I made sure the
smaller font was within the same family. This design is a big improvement from my first design because I
know the guidelines of what works well when designing and can follow them, confident of an improved
outcome. (Image came from Clipart.)