A Real-World Project for a Desktop Publishing Course.

College students who learn to use the tools of desktop publishing can put them to use in a variety of ways. They can create a professional-looking resume, a flier to advertise a meeting, or a poster to sell a car. A course in desktop publishing can certainly include assignments for documents like these, but instructors will probably want their students also to put their skills to use on projects that meet organizational needs. For several semesters at the institution where I teach desktop publishing, many of my students have fulfilled the requirement for an original major project by working with nonprofit and campus organizations to design brochures which fulfill important needs. In this article I mention the specific tools my students use, describe the brochure project, and offer some guidelines. The information should be useful for faculty just beginning to teach desktop publishing and for those with experience who have not yet dealt with this kind of project. TOOLS: SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE Without the proper tools, no one can produce the kinds of documents that meet the criteria for the project described here. State-of-the-art technology is not essential, but students do need hardware and software capable of creating and printing documents of high-quality appearance. These needs can be met with a good pagelayout program, a graphics program, personal computers adequate to run these programs, and a laser printer. An image scanner makes a valuable addition to this basic setup. My students, who work in a PC Ibm-compatible) environment, have the advantage of being able to learn and use two high-end packages, PageMaker and CorelDRAW, but less expensive layout and graphics programs will enable good results. Text for a document can be keyboarded directly in the layout program; for a project in which there is a great deal of text, it is good for students to have access to a word processor they already know how to use. Writing the text will go faster, and layout software can import word-processed files (though one should insure that the program being used does import files created in a particular word processor). For those who are using computers with the Microsoft Windows environment, one source for graphics work is the Paintbrush accessory program that is included with Windows. During the phase of the semester in which they are working on brochures, my students have some time during our three class periods a week to spend on their projects, but the majority of project time is spent in the Technology Center. There are 17 PCs in the center similar to those in the classroom, a number that is sufficient to handle the needs of my 35-40 students a semester (in two sections) as well as of other students who use the advanced applications available on these PCs. CLIENTS FOR THE PROJECT At the first meeting of the class each semester, I emphasize the original brochure project and encourage each student to think about an organization that might need such a document, as either a new creation or a makeover of an existing brochure. The students may work with a business or with a nonprofit entity, including a campus organization. I tell them that some potential clients will be contacting me, but that it's primarily their responsibility to find one. About once a week thereafter, I remind the students that they will need a client for the brochure. The project isn't due until the last week of class, but I make them aware that they'll need a good deal of time to work with a client to figure out what's needed for text and graphics, and more time working with the software to see which design options work and which do not. Finally, I warn that the client will always want changes after seeing the initial brochure design. My experience has been that about four out of five students will find brochure clients on their own. Some in the class belong to campus organizations that need a brochure; others ask around campus and discover needs - a department chair who wants to advertise next-semester electives, a professor who needs to promote a for-credit wintersession trip to Europe. …