This is a documentation of the Communications Design Class of 2014 working as a design firm for ProLiteracy. We are a group of students dedicated to making a difference through the process of critical thinking and design. Through brainstorming, generating rough ideas and finally creating completed work, together we developed numerous solutions for ProLiteracy to implement into their business and marketing plan.
Our team divided into three different subgroups: awareness, funding, and the future. Utilizing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, we explored multiple avenues of how to best solve their problems through design. The awareness group created three campaigns that tackled the idea of gain awareness in different ways. The funding group developed a myriad of 3-dimensional projects as a way to attract potential donors. Lastly, the future group explored the several areas of technology and attempted to generate products for ProLiteracy in the future.

The Awareness Group executed two campaigns that assessed ProLiteracy’s issue very differently. The One Letter Campaign touched on the fact that each letter makes a difference and is essential in the process of learning and understanding words. Branching off this campaign was the Vision Campaign, which embodied a typical eye chart, yet displayed a call-to-action message encouraging donors to give money to the organization. The second campaign was titled The Cause/Effect Campaign which explored the several different challenges low-literate individuals encounter.

The One Letter Campaign is an awareness campaign aimed to educate the general public of how important it is to end adult non-literacy. The campaign is comprised of advertisements showing single words and short phrases that have one letter taken away, changing the meaning. This emphasizes the value of literacy.

This public service announcement is a more personal solution that uses cut paper and animation to tell a story. It is a whimsical narrative of how literacy affects various socio-economic problems. The book is the magical tactic that resolves these issues. It communicates that if the community takes a hold of this pandemic, together they can defeat low-literacy.

These short graphic animations are aimed to show how literacy and other socio-economic problems are directly related. These can be used as short public service announcements to educate people about the low literacy issue.

The Future Group approached ProLiteracy’s issues in a very innovative and astounding manner. They designed and executed five different projects, all in which tackled the problem in different ways. Their main focus was integrating technology and already utilized ProLiteracy material. Ultimately, they designed solutions in which ProLiteracy can implement over the next five, ten even twenty years.

This is designed for adults with the lowest level of literacy helping them during their daily lives to become more independent. The user can take a picture of an object that they can’t read, and the app reads it aloud. Snap and learn will save the picture to their flashcard deck located through EdNet for them to review later.

As a cheaper solution to the native application, our responsive web site can be used on any device, any operating system and any screen size.

This is designed for adults with the lowest level of literacy helping them during their daily lives to become more independent. The user can take a picture of an object that they can’t read, and the app reads it aloud. Snap and learn will save the picture to their flashcard deck located through EdNet for them to review later.

This website is a revamp of the current ProLiteracy educational network website, linked within proliteracy.com. This will provide more tools to people who are low literate and make it easier for them to access materials. The additional tutorial will teach digital literacy on how the products will be intuitive and easy to use for adults of all reading levels.

In addition to the revamp of the website we felt that a native application fulfilled the need for on the go learning. Also, our target demographic was shown to use a smartphone as their primary source of internet.

This is designed for adults with a higher level of literacy who want to utilize their skills and practice their critical reading. This application takes ProLiteracy’s New Readers Press and creates an online downloading platform where the learner can read books while getting the help you need along the way. In addition, this application houses an online book store, which allows readers to search through books of different reading levels, buy them, and share them through the book club. Another feature of this application is the appearance of the text within a book, which slowly appears on the screen. This allows the readers to not feel overwhelmed by the text, creating an encouraging environment while reading.

This is an opportunity for ProLiteracy to collaborate with Google Glass and create an application that can greatly aid in learning how to read. The glasses would help the user learn words in everyday life situations, such as the spelling and phonics of words. Because of these glasses, low literate adults will be able to become more independent. Glass could function as flashcards, identifying objects that adults may come across. The glasses would also be able to break down complex information, such as a prescription label. They could also facilitate community based learning, such as a book club.

The designers would like to thank everyone at ProLiteracy for collaborating with us during our semester long project. This collaboration has been a huge success, thanks to the numerous employees at ProLiteracy. Without your assistance and participation, our successful designs would not have been possible. Thank you for this once in a lifetime experience!