At the moment I am working on a series of videos intended to raise awareness among students for common language mistakes within scientific writing. This campaign mainly focusses on so-called ‚Denglisch‘, which is a neologism comprised of ‚Deutsch‘ – German and ‚Englisch‘ – English. However I am not going to delve into the details of the subject matter here, instead I want to give you a glimpse of what to think about when you are designing informational media

Know your Audience

The first and most important step is to lean back and think about your audience. Who are you designing for, what is their relationship with your product? What are you trying to achieve for them? And how are they going to use the thing you do?

Conceptualize

Once you have found out about your audience, try to make a concept. Write down ideas and storyboards. Try to narrate a story using specific examples. Do some brainstorming with collegues, talk about how you are trying to achieve certain effects and discuss stylistic choices.

Do lean Development

Last but not least: Produce. But don’t shy away from producing something while everything else is not perfect. You will learn the most about the media you are creating and about the audience you are targeting by doing lean research and development. What I mean by that is, that you should start producing once producing is possible. Try to use as few resources as possible and make prototypes of your product. Shoot with a smartphone instead of an expensive camera, use cheap effects, do rudimentary lighting, use a cheap built in microphone, but just do it. Producing will help you understand the production toolkit you need and will teach you a lot about what works and what doesn’t work. Maybe you have to change how you produce, maybe you have to change the whole concept in order to achieve what you were shooting for. The worst thing you could have done is to go for the highest production value and then find out that your concept is trash.

Furthermore this way enables you to get your product out the consumers, you can learn about whether there is an actual need you are fulfilling. You can also begin to estimate what size the audience is that you are producing for and how much enthusiasm you are generating. From here you can start refining your concept, your message, your production. Now is the time to buy a more expensive microphone, to produce your idea with higher production value.