I’d glad I got the chance to meet with each of you during class yesterday to discuss your tap essays. Most of them are still in the “early draft” stage, but I am confident that you’re headed in the right direction. Between now and Monday, most of you need to focus on three things:

• Images — Carefully examine your essay to find places where pictures can either enhance your written text (in the background) or replace your written text entirely. Remember to use the Tapestry format for what it does best: visual storytelling. If you’re creating images from scratch (or cropping images to fit perfectly into the app), use the following pixel dimensions: 1136 x 640.
• The “hook” — Your essay needs a great title and a beautiful first screen, which is what users will see in the Tapestry app. And once they click on your essay, the first few screens need to capture and hold their attention. So be bold, be funny, be insightful, be artistic. Once you hook your readers, they’ll stick with you for awhile.
• Details — I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a writing format where little details matter as much as they do in Tapestry, so even after you’ve finalized your text and your images, keep working on the small, subtle aspects of your essay. I know that attention to detail will pay off when you release your essay into the wild next week.

Next week, we’ll wrap up the Tapestry project and start thinking about our third major assignment. Here’s how we’ll spend our time in class:

• On Monday, we will conduct a more formal peer critique exercise to provide you with one more round of feedback before your essays “go live” on Tapestry. You should come to class with a finished essay (accessible on your iPad) and be ready to tap through it on our big screens in the Innovation Space. To make sure that your essays really shine, we’re going to get nit-picky during our workshop, so I cannot stress this enough: your tap essay must be completely finished before you come to class. You have no other homework for the weekend, so please don’t let us down!
• Before you come to class on Wednesday, please email me the URL for your tap essay and upload all of your resources for this project to your shared Google Drive folder, as described on the assignment sheet. In class, I will introduce our next project, “Interrogating the Interface,” and I’ll solicit some midterm feedback from you about what’s going well and what we might want to change during the second half of the semester.

If you feel like you need extra help with your tap essay, I would be happy to meet with you. Next week I need to modify my office hours due to some departmental meetings, so I will be available on Tuesday and Wednesday from 9-12. Feel free to drop by during those hours or email me if you’d like to reserve a specific time slot.