Chapter 12: Design for Social Media…But Not Really

Working with Multimedia Assets

Designing for Social Media: White Space is Not Your Enemy Chapter 12

Chapter Outline

  • Where to begin?
  • A design speed bump
  • Working with images
  • Working with audio
  • Video clips
  • Animation
  • Apps and plug-ins and widgets, oh my!
  • Multimedia storytelling
  • Try this

Keywords | Vocabulary

  • App (application)
  • B roll
  • CSS (cascading style sheet)
  • Encoding
  • .GIF
  • Image Gallery
  • Ken Burns effect
  • Loop
  • MPEG-4
  • Pacing
  • Plug-in
  • Site map
  • Slideshow
  • .SWF
  • Transitions
  • Tweened animation
  • Widget

Just like our brief chapters on infographics and storyboarding, this chapter on multimedia is meant to remind students to employ what they already have learned when working in social media environments.

Key Student Takeaways

  1. For slideshows:
  • Give users control.
  • Think narrative, pacing and transitions.
  • Use the Ken Burns effect judiciously and for a purpose.
  • Loop or don’t loop with a rationale.
  1. Interactive Web galleries provide photo-sharing opportunities if that is your objective.
  2. For video clips, try to get professional assistance. In lieu of that, why not capture your own video?
  • Keep things simple, though.
  • Think composition and lighting.
  • Avoid moving the camera too much, as in continuous zooming and panning.
  • Shoot more footage than you think you need.
  • Don’t forget about sound, both the kind you want to capture and the kind you don’t.
  • Don’t go crazy with special effects and transitions while editing.
  • Encode the video in the appropriate file format.
  1. Audio and ear candy, while not visual, do communicate. Sometimes audio is as effective as, if not more effective than, video.
  2. There’s no getting around the need for animation in today’s electronic screen environments. For newbies, using tweened animation can simplify a complex process.
  3. For audiences, interactivity is boss. If you have an electronic presence, then you probably need a tablet app; but leave the app-development to the pros for the time being. Plug-ins add functionality behind-the-scenes, such as updating blog posts and embedding media players. As their name implies, it’s easy to for newbies to “plug in” such extras. Widgets are the frontstage face of plug-ins. They display everything from up-to-date weather graphics to crowd-sourced maps.

Quiz Questions

The 5-minute Motivation to Read Quiz

Share three things you learned from the reading. Be specific.

Short Answer Quiz Questions

Compare the purposes of a slideshow versus a photo-sharing website. Offer an example of when each would make sense for a communication purpose.

Give an example of when an audio clip might be as effective, or even more effective, as a video clip in a multimedia communication context.

Discuss the importance of user control in multimedia design, and give an example to support your response.

Multiple Choice Quiz Questions

The Ken Burns effect refers to

  1. Telling every story from a historical timeline POV, even if it’s not about history
  2. Using too many sappy transitions and looping footage ad infinitum
  3. Shooting more footage than you need in a variety of angles just in case
  4. Panning and zooming across photos to add movement to still pictures

Some helpful tips for amateurs shooting video include

  1. Keep everything simple and don’t go crazy with special effects
  2. Shoot your transitions as you go to avoid extra time in the
    editing suite
  3. Compose everything as a close-up mug shot and don’t be a
    heavy breather
  4. Use panning and zooming for interest and don’t shoot too
    much footage

Tweened animation refers to

  1. Illustration that uses both hand-drawn and computer-generated animation
  2. Software that fills in the motion blanks between a few key
    illustrated frames
  3. The shift between Gen X and Gen Y that forced changes in graphics
  4. Online animated graphics, such as those in gaming, that target tweens