Photograph of Catalyst Promotion Poster for Fall 2013 obtained from Catalyst Facebook Page

CATALYST

Reflection

As I was looking through Catalyst, I found a lot of things that interest me and I had a hard time choosing what to analyze. I had to look through the magazine a couple of times, hunting for specific details before I decided on “What Does The Font Say?” The main reason I chose it was because I found it the text very interesting. It give readers another point of view about fonts. Also, the visual design of the page caught my attention. With a large title that runs across the whole page and text located on the bottom left, it definitely was screaming “READ ME NOW!”

I think I did a lot of improvement over my rough draft. Although I think I took too much time revising, I felt really glad about it. I realized that I took some time to get the points of the text into my head as well. For my rough draft, I was to focused on summarizing the text that I neglected my analysis points and strategies to engage my audience. I was so afraid that my audience would not understand my paper because I did not summarize the text properly. Other than that, I had some grammar mistakes that I did not realize only after I did the peer review and was reading my paper out loud! Aside from all that, I still feel I need to work on my wordy sentences and structure. I have a habit of writing really long and wordy sentences and I think I really need to work on it because will lose their interest when they see really long sentences. I should break them down so that they will be able to slowly gasp my ideas. I found my analysis paper to be quite rigid as well in terms of the language I used. I want my readers to feel more relaxed when reading it but with such formal language, I think they felt like they were reading a report instead.

Before this assignment was introduced, I have never bothered to look at any student publications on campus and I have absolutely no idea that Catalyst even existed. As I read my text of choice more carefully, I realize it was quite an article. It was a pretty short text but it was quite profound as it included a lot of aspects and interesting details to engage its readers. Looking at it, I realize that short texts does not mean that they will have less interesting details and ideas. “Do not judge a book by its cover” definitely applies to “What Does The Font Say?”

Interview

For the interview, I chose to interview Alison Nicole Koebke, the head of the design team through e-mail because we could not set up a time to meet up. And below are the questions I asked her.

1) How did catalyst developed?
2) What is the biggest challenge Catalyst have encountered as publication?
3) What do you consider most when publishing Catalyst?
4) What do you think readers should focus on when reading catalyst?
5) Do you think that catalyst has affected ISU students in any way? What aspects impacted them the most?
6) Do you think that Catalyst’s has achieved its goal to expand on design and modern culture and lifestyle since it started?
7) What do you think is your biggest contribution to Catalyst?
8) How has your contributions help promote or enhance Catalyst?