Special Topics Assignment: War/Conflict

War/Conflict

Charity and I were assigned the War/Conflict topic.  Charity made 5 amazing visuals for the project, and I created this Power Point, which parallels the visuals in the articles we read.  In my article, there was a link to a NY Times article that showed the pictures of all the dead American soldiers from the Iraq War in small cubic pictures.  This visual gave the reader the power to decide what to see and how they wanted to see it because with every small square came a new picture of a dead soldier.  We wanted to portray this with our PP, so I picked a main image (slide 2) and divided it up randomly with action squares.  Each square that a reader chose would take them to a different slide, and after you click the other images, it would bring you back to the main slide.  

Analyzing based on connotation, attributes, and placement:

War and conflict is pretty self-explanatory, but as we read in our articles, I knew I needed to create a PowerPoint that shows shocking images to change the perspectives of different viewers.  The First Slide was opened on one computer, to introduce our title and give the emotional affect of the large and symbolic graphic.  On the other computer, I started the presentation from the second slide, putting it in kiosk view (so the only way the viewer can interact with the slides is if they click the image, not click to the next slide).  As I mentioned above, I filled the image with 7 action squares, all linked to a different slide.  The disorganized placement of each square on the image creates a chaos with the viewers eye, also symbolizing the chaos of war and terror.  The entire shape was not a perfect square, which I think contributed to the disorganized emotional pull.

The theme was dark and emotional, and we used the same colors and fonts within each slide to give it a cohesive feel (connotation).  Each image was enlarged, cropped, placed center on the page, and I added a glow edge to each image as well.  The theme could be too specific, because we are only focusing on the Iraq war in these photos.  However, I think we did an excellent job sticking to our theme, using color choices, font choices, and layout and placement choices to convey the theme of war and conflict.


I wanted to use as little type as necessary, only including the captions and citations, to convey the emotions of each image.  I placed each image center on the page, and made it as large as possible in order to gain the attention of the viewer.  Each of these elements: connotation, attributes, and placement, all played a large part in our design and theme of the project, and our goal of conveying our War message.

Pick A Square