Discover Challenge

Mixing Media

Add another dimension to your message by meshing a new medium with your current style.

"Collage" by Paul Loubet (CC BY 2.0).

“The medium is the message,” said philosopher Marshall McLuhan once upon a time. (He also predicted the invention of the web 30 years before it happened, so he was clearly on to something.) This week, integrate a second medium into your post to add more depth to what you usually publish.

A few weeks ago, we featured Jenny Maloney’s delightful site, Place for the Stolen, as an editors’ selection on Discover. Jenny’s daily short stories are a little wry, a little dark, a little off-kilter, and a lot of fun.

But it’s not just the words that give her stories life and shape, it’s their design. She publishes every post as an image, using fonts, colors, alignment, and line lengths to create a graphic that gives each story unique visual interest and dimension:

jenny-maloney-1

Her design choices might reinforce the mood of a story, add lightness to a grim tale, or create a sharp juxtaposition between story and visual to leave us unnerved. Each day, I look forward  to reading her latest work and seeing how she’s chosen to present it.

This week, publish a post containing the kind of work you’d normally publish — but mix it with a second type of media, either digital or analog:

  • A photo (or several!).
  • An illustration.
  • An embedded video, tweet, map, or Instagram photo.
  • A graphic, like the ones Jenny creates.
  • Clippings from print books or magazines.
  • An animated GIF (yes, you can make your own).
  • Words (if you normally publish photos or art).

If you’re interested in exploring graphics like Jenny’s, there are great, free websites like Canva that will help you create one — we’ve even got a tutorial — while the free tools at PicMonkey are our favorites for combining text and photos. This tutorial on creating visuals that aren’t photos is also a great starting place.

The goal here is to integrate whatever added medium you choose. Don’t just add a photo to your poem, layer the words over it. Don’t just embed a tweet mid-post, use a series of tweets to tell your actual story. Use the second medium to help communicate meaning, not simply as a fun added visual.

Is this one a little tough? We hope so! Exploring new territory and pushing up against boundaries spark creativity, so we’re excited to see what happens here.

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  1. I like the idea of telling a story through tweets! Or maybe a poem? I found a web app a while ago called WriteRack that breaks up text into tweet-sized bites. Might finally give it a try for this challenge 🙂

    Liked by 6 people

      1. After logging in, you type or paste your words into the text box, and WriteRack automatically breaks up the text into tweets marked “1/”, “2/”, “3/”…and so on. That’s as far as I have gotten. I assume when you are ready you hit “Post” and off they go one by one to your twitter account 🙂

        Liked by 1 person

  2. My website’s blog is all about radio imaging.

    Can I please have some advice on how to incorprate Please parten spelling mistakes. Radio imaging into this challenge?

    I appreciate the hellp and hope to find myself on descover soon!

    Liked by 3 people

    1. You could try to tell a story through the images themselves, or layer text over images. You could create a collage that mixes radio images, other images, and text, and upload a photo of that, or you could turn some images into a GIF. It’s up to you, and what you want to communicate!

      Liked by 2 people

      1. “If you chase after sayings and you lose yourself in words, you are not better off than the man whose sword fell into the water and he marked the spot on the railing.”
        “A much easier and shorter way as the effort to become a Buddha is simply to be a Buddha.”

        Like

    1. Good job with Canva! If you want to include the actual PDF in your blog post, your best bet would be to save it as an image, and then upload it — Canva should allow you to save it as an image file. (You want a file name that ends in .gif, .jpg, or .png.)

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  11. Michelle,

    I’m not a photo blogger.

    If you check out my site you’ll see what my blog is about.

    I might tell a story that has to do with how I got into radio imaging hopefully comments won’t be closed so I can send it to you when it’s all done!

    BTW I’m not good with pingbacks eather.

    Like

    1. Even when comments eventually close, pingbacks will still work. To create a pingback, include a link to this post in your post — a pingback is automatically created when you publish a post that links to another post. So:
      1. You write a post.
      2. You include a link to https://wordpress.com/dailypost/discover-challenges/mixing-media/.
      3. You publish your post.
      4. WordPress.com automatically creates the pingback, and your post gets added to the grid below.

      Have fun!

      Like

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