Photo
https://www.instagram.com/p/CAEs7Eupgbz/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
How did your author photo you recorded for upload to Instagram?
This week I wanted to turn my focus to good design which is supposedly much harder to find than bad design (Norman 2013, para. 2), or is it? Within minutes, I had made a list of well-produced designs and picked one for my photo. I chose the book “MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer” which is about designing better online user experiences. As books have multiple pages I decided to use Instagram’s Layout app which gave me the ability to create collages allowing me to take images of the cover, inside page and back of the book. The layout app was created in ‘response to competitors offering functions that [Instagram] did not’ (Leaver, Highfield, Abidin 2020, p. 78)
I took the pictures with my Samsung Galaxy s10e’s default photo app before exporting them to Layout; from there I was able to choose from a variety of grids and picked one that had a good hierarchy. I wanted the book’s page on top and the covers on the bottom, framing the image by the importance of the content while maintaining aesthetics. Once the grid was complete I exported the image to Instagram where I added a filter and adjusted the exposure applying the effects to the whole images rather than individual parts which were a constraint.
How did you publish the photo you recorded for upload to Instagram?
I learnt the hard way in my week nine photography blog that I need to choose a place with sufficient lighting. I set up a small area with good lighting to give my photos consistency which saved time as I didn’t have to sort through large amounts of retakes. Because of the Covid-19 lockdowns, my photography’s focus has been on physical objects such as the book rather than the environment it’s in and being confined to home, I have felt it is unnecessary to include a geotag.
I wanted all three images to look part of a set which the grid helped me to create and gave the photos ‘characteristics of modern graphic design’ (Manovich 2016 p. 67) with hierarchy and vectored lines that divide each image. Another aspect of design that inspired me was copywriting, which I used to write better captions for my post by employing an alliteration, “a good book about good design,” short but sweet, linking back to my focus of good design and also the books.
How did you distribute the photo you published on Instagram to other social media services?
This week I decided to concentrate on using more hashtags with specific keywords “#gooddesign“, “#design“, “#reading” and “#book” to distribute my post. I found by being more precise, applying terms like “book” distributed it to a larger audience than just designers and within minutes, I had received a “like” on my post from a random member of the community. I wanted to get people’s attention fast because ‘posts in a user’s feed are temporally positioned in relation to the current moment’ (Leaver, Highfield, Abidin 2020, p. 71) and sent it out around midday to increase the chances of international communities interacting with it.
The post was also uploaded to Tumblr which is a pretty easy process for images as my account is linked to Instagram, however, it was frustrating when I accidentally distributed the same post twice – to edit or remove it had to be done manually on Tumblr as the changes aren’t updated automatically. There also had to be a manual upload to Flickr which was a simple process of adding my captions and posting it and a benefit of not linking my Instagram was I didn’t have the issue of duplicating posts; although it’s convenient to automatically post between accounts.
References
Norman, D 2013, ‘Design of Everyday Things, Revised Edition’, Nielsen Norman Group, viewed 16 May 2020, <https://jnd.org/preface_design_of_everyday_things_revised_edition>
Manovich, L. 2016, ‘Part 2. Professional and Designed Photos’, Instagram and the Contemporary Image, University of San Diego, USA. pp. 58-70
Leaver, T., Highfield, T., Abidin, C., 2020. ‘Chapter 3 Ecologies’, Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures. Digital Media and Society, United Kingdom. p. 64-79
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