3b: The Visual Lookfeel (and more!)

Suggested deadline: November 21

So we promised a bit of marketing in this course, but the truth is that we’re academics who couldn’t sell our way out of a cardboard box. But we can talk a bit about visuals, show notes, site design, and the other components that will give your show a coherent feel.

If you’re following along with our process, you’ll be creating your podcast in WordPress. This gives you lots of control over how your site looks and how you will present your podcast to the world, so you’ll get time to think about colours, fonts, and featured images for individual episodes. In addition, you need to select a cover image for your podcast. You can play with perhaps designing a logo or other visual signifiers of your show.

You also need to choose where you want to make your podcast available. By using the RSS feed, anyone can add the podcast to any podcatcher, but you can also submit your podcast for indexing to Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and others. Some folks make ethical decisions about where to share their work. What’s your plan?

For this assignment, make a post to answer the following questions:

What will your podcast cover image be? This is how your podcast will be most known visually. The image must be a square, 1400 x 1400 to 3000 x 3000 pixels in size. And you must have rights to use the image. Consider starting with a resource like Unsplash to find an image, or if you know how to use a tool like Canva you can play around in there. And this guide offers some tips on things to think about as you design.
What do you want your podcast’s site to look like? Try to think of some colours and images that can act as inspiration for your design.
What will you include in your show notes each week, and how will you structure them? It’s useful here to think about what your shownotes should achieve: are they informational, or about building community, or what?
Where do you hope to index your podcast? Take a moment to find out the process for submitting podcasts wherever you intend to submit.
Finally, with a thought towards some kind of “marketing,” how will you plan to share your show? Does it need a social media presence, will you share with your scholarly community, or do you have another plan?

Important: make sure you choose “Visuals” for the post category; this will aggregate your post alongside other participants on the Visuals post page (if this link doesn’t have any content yet, get editing!).

In the Fall 2022 iteration of this course, Week 3 Assignments are due on November 21. You can sign up to join our live discussion of Week 3 by clicking here. And whenever you are accessing this course, we offer support via our Mattermost Team, which you can join by clicking here.