Welcome to Public Relations Visual Communication at the University of Florida

Welcome to the PR Visual Communication Blog

Octopus by Kay Tappan

I’m looking forward to an exciting and productive six weeks. On this site you will find course updates, lecture outtakes, lab material covered each week, and other visual communication miscellany. Feel free to leave comments but make sure to email me at pur4103 at yahoo dot com regarding assignments, clarification, or any other important questions or notifications that you might have. Best, Kay Tappan

Lab Week 13: Twitter Image Design

The most complicated part of Twitter design is creating appropriate images in terms of dimensions and file size. It is important to be consistent with visuals, as guest lecturer April Schroeder of Liquid Creative Studio pointed out in her presentation last week.

The Twitter profile design is made up of three images: The profile image, the header image, and the background image. Below is a screen capture of the NYT Bits Blog Twitter page:

New York Times Bits Blog Twitter

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Lecture Outtakes: Social Media

[Social media have caused] a shift in trust: to the brand known as ‘friend.’ -Edelman, 2010

It goes without saying that social media have profoundly changed the practice of public relations and, by extension, public relations visual communication. One need not look far to find ample examples.

Crowdsourced Content

Jonathan Jones gave a great talk on crowdsourced content that was sponsored by UF PRSSA and the PR Advisory Council, and his focus corresponded well with our own class discussion of social media. Essentially Jones pointed out that social media have made it increasingly easy to crowdsource ideas at relatively little cost. Jones sited this Doritos ad for the Superbowl:

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Lab Week 11: WordPress Header

WordPress Header Design

Creating a custom header for your WordPress site is a great way to personalize the WordPress template and achieve visual repeption with other tactics. We created the following two designs in Photoshop during week 11 lab.

wordpress header kay tappan

WordPress 2010 Header Design: Kay Tappan

Wordpress Header, Kay Tappan

WordPress 2010 Header Design: Kay Tappan

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Lecture Outtakes: Media Ethics

Media Ethics and Communitarianism

Way back in week 6 we discussed several well-known ethical approaches: Kant’s categorical imperative (which shapes current thought in the North Atlantic countries), Aristotle’s golden mean, and Bentham and Mill’s utilitarianism. The full lecture is available on Scribd.

This week I spent some time discussing communitariansim, which is outlined by scholars Christians, Fackler and Ferré.

The video below is a great example of communitarianism. This is an example of one work to emerge from the Scenarios from Africa project, which is a community-based, collaborative effort to increase HIV awareness and communication in several West African countries, including Burkina Faso, where this video originates.

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Lab Week 10: WordPress How To

WordPress How To

So this is a post on WordPress about how to use WordPress.

The tutorial (link to PDF is below) includes screen shots and covers the following:

  • Selecting a theme
  • Customizing background color, finding header image specs, and customizing the sidebar with widgets
  • Adding links to the sidebar and deleting the default WordPress links
  • SEO for WordPress
  • Formatting posts

Click here to view the WordPress How To.

Lecture Outtakes: Convergence

What Is Convergence?

kay tappan, convergence

Illustration by Kay Tappan

According to Webster.com, convergence is defined as “the merging of distinct technologies, industries or devices into a unified whole.” Convergence among various hardware, software and interpersonal encounters can be used to achieve synergistic outcomes. With regard to the practice of public relations, it is useful to subdivide the term into categories. It is important to note that the following categories are not mutually exclusive.

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