Weekly student updates need a makeover
Every week, SCAD sends out a monumental block of text that, most likely, the majority of people delete and the rest slog through to get to the good stuff.
The weekly student updates, an important tool used to disseminate information to SCAD students, is woefully absent in design and quality, and as students of art and design, we deserve better.
Consider, for a moment, other ways SCAD presents information. Admission material is updated annually and consistently. The textbook-sized catalog is award-winning and coveted at the beginning of each fall quarter, if only to see whose work made it in.
SCAD’s recently redesigned Web site is exciting and well-designed, chock full of dynamic content. SCAD’s students, of course, are top in their fields, which includes a whole school devoted to communication arts, in addition to a Writing major which offers classes for Web writing.
With all of those resources at hand, the students still get a monolith of text every Monday, without any design aspects, except bullet points and bold text.
Clubs and organizations have their events buried alive in the middle, lucky if anyone reaches their blurb before they get tired. A lot of people just delete it without even bothering.
The fact is that no one wants to spend their time reading through an almost 3,000-word document, as the Nov. 9 student updates were. Typically, the updates double or triple the length of a story on District.
As a result of bad design, the updates’ effectiveness is negligible. District, when advertising meetings and events in the updates has found the result to be minor; it’s safe to assume that other organizations on campus have the same result. If students are better informed, they’ll get more involved. This, of course, is good for the students, the organizations and SCAD as a whole.
The good news, though, is that ours is an easy problem to fix. The solutions for breaking up giant blocks of text and making them readable and interesting are almost endless. Read a Web site like District, open a magazine or read a mass email for a few of the solutions designers have come up with.
It’s time for SCAD to utilize the resources they have and give us information in a new, exciting way.
