Lab Entry #3
Media Bias & Poster Design
As someone who is very much interested in the visual arts and the aesthetic, I find graphic design in the form of posters, flyers and brochures to be extremely effective in the art of persuasion. Human beings feel and think in colours, and colours and shapes resonate with us and reflect ideas about our emotions and proclivities.
For this very reason, by appealing to our humanity, propaganda in the form of paintings and drawings can be very successful in their attempts to convince us of certain notions or lead us to believe certain ideas.
Today’s lab assignment was to use Canva to create our own guidelines on ‘fake news’ and the internet’s misinformation crisis. I really enjoyed using Canva because there were a lot of different poster templates to play around with. These templates were organized by theme and purpose and included a search function, which made it easy for Amanda and I to find visuals that resonated with us.
Ultimately, we chose a template for a carwash fundraiser and ended up tweaking the colour schema to better fit what our imagination called for. The original blues and yellows translated into yellows and reds (which are colours that were generally used in old-school political propaganda posters). The font remained the same since we believed it to be legible and appropriate.
Using Canva, teachers can create a list of classroom rules and input pictures and other visual elements to make the poster more attractive. Perhaps if the poster is attractive enough, students will remember the rules. The art of propaganda is the art of persuasion, so who says a nice poster can’t change the classroom dynamic.
Now I’m recalling my eighth-grade math teacher’s cringey “Koala-ty Work” poster. Despite it being very silly, the pun actually encouraged me to submit quality work — for whatever psychological reason I can’t think of.
Students can also use Canva to create fake movie posters or fake advertisements for their larger projects. Say a student creates a documentary, Canva has many templates that would be perfect for a movie cover. Or say a student creates a smartphone application, Canva can be used to portray all the neat functions of the application much like an ad would.
In a similar vein, students can use Canva’s different functions to explore the intricacies of graphic design. What do colours mean to us? Why do certain images and fronts make us feel the way we do? How are we easily (and not-so-easily persuaded). This can easily tie-in to different design purposes, whether its for books, movies, ads, political posters, etc…
Canva is a great tool that brings something enjoyable and hands-on in the classroom. Students will feel that they have created something worth-while and influential, and with a proper unit plan, Canva can be used to foster creativity in academics, ethics and critical thinking.
