Another problem with taking the quick short cut route of doing ds106 assignments is generally the text tools are limited to slapping text on top of photos. I am seeing a number of the early work my students are doing is that are not really looking at how the text interacts with their design.
If the text is just typed over the picture, it will look flat, often it is not as readable due to conflict with the background, and frankly, it ends up looking not designed.
I’m beginning to wonder if when asked to designa poster, if students are really thinking about say, how movie posters look?
Let’s say i am working on some assignment, maybe it is designing a book or album cover, and I use a photo of my friend Bryan Alexander. I can use many tools, but I choose pixlr a free web based editor I see a numnber of students are using — and woah, I am impressed, it has layering tools and thus can do many things I want students to be doing in their graphics.
But if all I do is toss some text on top of Bryan, it looks cheap:

There are all kinds of problems, it clashes with the background, the color is not really working well with the color in the images. it looks like it is slapped on. This is not designed.
What can we do?