Dr. Randy Brooks
Faculty Web Publisher
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Case Book Web Design Team
The final project in Millikin University's EN301 Web Publishing course is a client publication project. A team of students from EN301 were pleased to serve as the web publication team for A Web Case Book on BELOVED by Toni Morrison.
The web publishing team collaborated with Dr.
Braniger and her editorial board to establish publication goals for an online case book. The team also met with the EN202 class to discuss in detail their
overall content expectations for the case book. The web publication team provided
supplementary material for the content, structure and overall design
of the website. It was a great learning opportunity to work with such
the editorial board, and to feature the content created by a
class of very talented writers.
Sarah Scharnett wrote in her designer review:
What works best about our case book design is the variety of information we have included. We chose to include pages identifying the student authors for the papers written, which gives both their pictures and a brief autobiography of each student. Additionally, we chose to include information about Toni Morrison and her life, including primarily links to websites with more biographical information as well as information about the wide recognition she has received for Beloved. In addition to the papers themselves, we also chose to include a page providing visitors with a brief historical background of the novel in order that they understand history’s important role within the novel’s plot. Finally, after some gentle prodding from Dr. Brooks, we included a page giving viewers a brief overview of the work done as web publication designers as well as a brief explanation of the process we went through working with Dr. Braniger’s class to complete this project.
The client was appropriately focused on developing the content of the case book, which gave us a lot of creative freedom with the web publication design. With the need for so much information to be contained within the site, we chose to keep the design simple, mirroring the colors and structure of the cover of the book that our client showed us during our first meeting. Since the novel deals with several disturbing issues resulting from slavery in America, we chose the simple picture of a sad slave woman for our banner, representing the novel’s protagonist. As a final added touch, we asked the class to vote on a memorable quote from the novel to include on our home page: "This is not a story to pass on" which was featured on the home page.
Our team worked very well together. We all communicated with one another as well as with the client, but had well-defined individual jobs that fit each of our interests and talents. As an English Education major, I probably communicated most often with the client simply because I was most familiar with the students in EN202 (with whom I have had many classes before!). Additionally, because I had taken Writing about Literature before and contributed to Millikin’s first online casebook for Dr. O’Conner writing about Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, I led the content related writing tasks, while Justin and Rachael worked together with the client to make design decisions.
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