LACIE NGUYENPlagiarism Poster Campaign
Graphic Design / Visual Design / School Project
A poster campaign that informs students the basic principles of APA citation cite and how to cite correctly.
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My Role
- Graphic Design
- Illustration
- Visual Design
Team
- Jason Tran
- Morgan Emsley
- Michelle Cho
- Denisa Marinescu
Duration
- 3 weeks - Spring 2021
Why Poster Campaign?
This project was from a lower-division writing course. Plagiarism occasionally occurs at universities although some students do not intend to plagiarize. In creating a set of informative posters, my team aimed for providing students at SFU (Simon Fraser University) with a guide to avoiding plagiarism.
Key Findings
To get insights into how students think they would fall into plagiarism, the team conducted a survey and got 12 answers from SFU students. Most students believe they have a high potential to plagiarize in their first year due to their inexperience with citation styles like APA or MLA.
With APA 6 being one of the most used referencing formats at SFU, we decided that our poster campaign would focus on the most used aspects of APA 6: paper formatting, paraphrasing, direct quotations, block quotations, and the references page.
Getting into Design
Because our main audiences were SFU students, I suggested my team use colours that are similar to SFU’s colour palette for brand consistency. To create an eye-catching design, our team used contrasting colours: dark red as the background colour and white for our header's colour.
Red
#D12940
RGB: 209, 41, 64
Black
#272526
RGB: 39, 37, 38
White
#FFFFFF
RGB: 255, 255, 255
Color palette for our poster campaign
We wanted a san-serif font as we aimed for a simple and minimalist design. Nunito typeface was chosen for the headers due to its round strokes, which bring a soft touch to the poster. Therefore, the design won’t be a strict guide but a more friendly and engaging guide. For the body text, Roboto was used for readability because of its uniform and thin stroke widths.
Chosen typefaces for our poster campaign
Our goal is to turn the posters into quick guides to APA 6, so as a team, we decided to use graphics as informative examples, arrows to highlight key details and QR codes that lead to resources with in-depth information for each topic. These decisions ensure our posters would remain effective when placed together or displayed alone.
Ideation, Sketching and Iterations
As one of two illustrators in the group, I was responsible for the sketches of Block Quotation, Paraphrasing and Reference Page posters. I used Procreate to sketch because I love how digital sketches let me see if the combination of colours works or not. For the graphics, I decided to use every object like a laptop or an actual reference paper to make the design more engaging with the audience.
My sketches for Paraphrasing, Block Quotation and Reference Page posters
Besides illustrating the graphic elements for five posters, I was in charge of designing the Block Quotation and Paper Checklist posters. I created the mock-ups and iterations in Photoshop and continued to improve the first mock-ups after receiving feedback from my teammates. During this process, I wanted a cohesive design by keeping the same format for all posters, so I discussed with my teammates and moved all the QR codes to the right side.
FIRST MOCK-UP
ITERATION AFTER FEEDBACK
Iteration process of Paper Checklist poster
Reflection
Through this project, I learned how to efficiently contribute my ideas and feedback to a group by describing how my idea can improve the designs, instead of just speaking my thought. I also enjoyed working with my teammates as I got to see how different ideas and perspectives brought the designs to a final decision.