Icons and Supporting Elements: Infographic of Conceptual Framework

For this image we were given the following assignment: 

Your challenge is to apply what you have learned about designing visuals for learning, and about creating icons, connection, alignment and priority, to design a solution for students.

• Choose a final format (ex. poster, flyer...) for your work. Consider where your final work will appear and how it will be shared with students. Making this framework visible in classrooms is a good thing and the College would like to be transparent in sharing our conceptual understanding with students in this way.

• Create visual icons that represent the competencies in the COE conceptual framework. Convey a simple, visual message (using icons) about each competency so that students may easily recognize, recall and describe each competency.

• Later, use “supporting elements” to quietly enforce your message and theme.

After given this assignment, me and partner brainstormed ways to effectively demonstrate the content that needed to go on the poster. We wanted to show how each of the concepts to be understood need to work together as building blocks for effective teaching. After thinking of this, we created a building block for each of the different concepts and stacked them on top of each other to show how they all work together. We incorporate the colors of the College of Education (blue and white) along with the colors of James Madison University (purple and gold) and also combined the color combinations by adding some of the gold to the blocks.

While creating this poster we were able to keep Krause's advice for creating icons in mind

- "As designers, it's important to understand the power and influence that well designed and properly presented images can have on their human audience: we ought to take seriously - and learn well - the knack of their creation."

- Give the elements "the recognition they deserve and treating them as the potentially powerful building, binding and theme-setting agents that they are. And while the casual observer might miss the subtleties of a supporting background or bordering element, designers ought to keep a sharp eye out for examples of their use - both successful and otherwise."

After reading the information provided from Krause, my partner and I put a lot of thought into the creation of each symbol. We wanted to make sure that each image effectively and clearly demonstrated the concept it was resembling. We kept a consistency to the "cartoonish" feel of each icon and kept them all within the same color range. Here is our final project: