As part of the year 6/7 Unit of Inquiry on advertising we had a look at Microsoft Publisher and how it can be used to create various documents useful in the advertising process.
Firstly, we looked at some of the template categories, including:
- Advertisements
- Business Cards
- Catalogs
- Flyers
- Newsletters
- Signs
MS Publisher contains many templates for each of these categories and allows you to specify a colour scheme for each.
We then talked about 3 important elements on these documents
- Logos
We looked at some famous logos and discussed their use of colour, shape, symbols and text. We discussed how many of the logos contained very simple shapes and colours. - Colour
We discussed how colour can be carefully selected to help promote the product. Green might represent freshness. Red might represent speed. Yellow might represent French fries (guess which company that might be). Some colours are happy (ie pink, purple & yellow) and others are more solemn (ie black, brown & grey). - Font
Just like colour, the selection of an appropriate font is important. A pretty cursive font might be nice for a florist, a fun font for a children’s product or a plain font for something more serious.
The students were then asked to complete an activity where they created a promotional document for a business or product of their choosing. They used various tools in MS Publisher to complete this task, including:
- Templates
- Auto shapes
- Group and ungroup
- Fill colour, line colour
- Text Boxes
- Font, font style and font size
- Order (Bring to Front & Send to Back) to overlap objects
