The topic of the second seminar was Travel Ads. This seminar mainly used the travel advertisements made by our classmates (from ELLBs) and analyzed their pros and cons. I found a funny phenomenon that people tend to defend their work by telling their own intentions even though the feedback and criticisms were usually based on the appearance of the design itself rather than the intentions. Anyway, I learned that an appealing travel ad needs to have clear and big fonts, attractive pictures, right grammar, and should look orderly and not chaotic. For example, the second Ad we were discussing is very chaotic since the lines are usually not parallel with each other which looks messy and the colors of the words make the contents unclear. However, one student found their font interesting because he thought the font looked like chalk and it was usually used in restaurants, and the colors looked like neon lights, which was quite an interesting interpretation.
My score: A6. I improved a lot comparing to last seminar (good blog post seminar A4), I think it was because I spoke more, and the most important factor (in my opinion) is that I’m better at observing things, if there’s no pictures and the seminar is just trying to let us discuss about what a good ad should contain I may not give good examples to support my points. Additionally, I’m not thinking through a fixed idea anymore, I’m constantly add new ideas to my old ideas when I’m still raising hands, that’s good. And I’m also one of the leaders of this seminar, however I didn’t really lead, actually Sarah was the only one who was actually leading, I think the main reason is that she usually just wrote down the names of our classmates while they were raising their hand so that we don’t have discuss anymore to make decision on who should we pick first to speak, I think this is very efficient. And we also finished the analysis of all ads on time, so I think the leading process is quite successful, just the assignment of duties is very unbalanced.