Digital media
Digital media assesses whether you can plan and produce a media outcome for a specified purpose and audience, using advanced techniques and design conventions, and justify the decisions you made.
Core rules and concepts
- Design principles: hierarchy, contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity, whitespace, colour and typography. Each choice should be justified against purpose and audience, not personal taste.
- Advanced techniques: layers and non-destructive editing, masks, adjustment layers, vector paths, keyframes and timeline editing, and consistent typographic hierarchy.
- Formats: raster formats store pixels (JPEG is lossy; PNG is lossless with transparency; GIF is limited to 256 colours), while vector formats (SVG) scale without loss - ideal for logos and icons.
- Set resolution for the final use: around 300 dpi at final size for print, screen resolution for web. Use RGB for screens and CMYK for print.
- Check asset licences (for example Creative Commons attribution) and log sources; build in accessibility such as alt text and at least 4.5:1 contrast for body text.
Worked example
Designing a club logo for a website header that must scale to double size for high-density screens. Reasoning: the logo needs transparency and clean edges at any size, so SVG is the best choice, with a PNG-24 with alpha as fallback for older systems. JPEG is unsuitable because it has no transparency and produces compression artefacts around sharp edges. Export at 2× and check legibility on a phone-sized viewport, recording that test as evidence.
Traps that cost marks
- Scaling up a low-resolution image instead of using a vector source.
- Submitting one flattened file with no evidence of layers or iteration.
- Design decisions with no link to the intended audience.
- Using copyrighted images without a licence or attribution record.