The overall audience for the Greenspring Review is Stevenson students (current, perspective, and alumni) and faculty/staff. For the poster, the audience is Stevenson students whether current, perspective, or alumni who suffer from anxiety, depression, or other mental illnesses. The Greenspring Review is an online magazine designed to showcase student work. I chose this audience because it is not uncommon for college students to suffer from these conditions.
I created the “Do’s” and “Don’ts” list to assist with the Greenspring Review redesign and catering to this audience. The website navigation should be simple, easy, and accessible. If navigation appears in multiple places or disappears entirely as a user scrolls through the website, this will be frustrating and confusing for the user. The website should make important information and selections clear. Not providing clear markers such as highlighting a link a user is selecting or the current page the user is on can mislead the user and unpredictably take them to a new page on the site they were not trying to access (Swallow, 2018). The website should use images and subheadings to break up text. The website should also use a simple, logical layout. Long blocks of text paired with complex and cluttered layouts can make the user feel as though they are being crowded. Using a simple and consistent color scheme instead of a complex busy one can also assist with this.
I applied my “Do’s” and “Don’ts” to the actual design of the poster. These “Do’s” and “Don’ts” consider the digital well-being of the user and their cognitive capacity (Li, 2020). I thought this was important to convey in my design. I decided against including a background image or texture because that would be a trigger for a viewer with anxiety. Instead, I chose a simple color scheme of three colors: light green, blue, and gray. I wanted the design to be simple, relaxing, and calming to look at. The colors also assisted in differentiating the difference between the “Do’s” and “Don’ts.” I chose icons to accompany the text to avoid having a text heavy list and to assist viewers in understanding the content. I used a line to divide the title from the main body and used rounded boxes to break up the content. The rounded boxes were chosen to continue the simple and calming feel of my design that boxes with sharp, harsh corners would have disrupted. This helped my design flow and increased the readability of the content. Additionally, I left enough white space around my design to give the elements padding, but made sure to not have too much white space which could overwhelm the viewer.