Finally! The moment I have been waiting for my whole life is
here. It is everything I imagined and more. As I stepped off the eight hour
flight into an open airport feeling that warm breeze hit my face and seeing
birds fly all around I knew that I was in paradise. “Aloha!”, yells one person,
a word I have been waiting to use for months and now I am in the land of
“aloha’s” and “mahalo”. All fourteen of us grab our luggage and head to the
bus. As we’re driving to the first stop I’m taking in all the scenery and
natives around me. We get to our hotel and what do you know the lobby is also
outside! As I settle into my room I go out on the balcony to see the view that
overlooks not only the pool, but the sandy beach with its clear blue water and
the Diamond Head volcano. This was only the first of three islands we were
going to visit so I wanted to as much in as possible. We walked around downtown
Honolulu visiting shops and chatting with the locals. Coming from the sunshine
state I did not expect much of a difference, but everything seemed so much more
tropical there. It was like I was on a different planet. This was already the
best vacation ever and it hadn’t even started yet.
The layout I chose was from the traveling option. I chose it because my blog is about my vacation to Hawaii. So naturally I wanted to find a layout that would fit what I wanted to write about. I went to Hawaii over summer for two weeks and it was the best vacation I had ever been on, which is why I wanted to write about it. The reason for why I chose the photo I did was because it was one of our first days in Hawaii and I was completely captivated by the scenery. I chose this photo as a background because it summed up my view of Hawaii.
ReplyDeleteThe photo provided for the background gave witness to a beautiful landscape, it was unfortunate that the black shadowed layout obscured this view, maybe something transparent white or blue would make this scene more visible. The photo corresponding to the text was too small and did not compliment the text as well as it could have, it is a great photo, and overall you nailed the beach and tropical theme with ease. If placed at the bottom, before the text, or beside, the photo may have been more rhetorically effective and immediately welcome the reader into the landscape with “aloha.” Your content has great potential for aesthetic imagery. It also would have been interesting to expand your comparison to Florida beaches, the sand, water, smells, people (natives) etc. The language style was simple and read conversational, almost stream-of-thought, especially with the lack of punctuation, some quick exclamations and short choppier sentences. If this language choice was very intentional- I believe it successfully embodied an extremely excited person telling the account of his or her vacation to friends or family. Given the very “free” criteria of the assignment, I think the author could have pushed their boundaries using white space and typography. Some questions aroused: Why have you been waiting your whole life to be here? This was obviously something you’d been looking forward to, what set this apart from a typical tourist trip? Just choosing one moment in the day or one scene may have stood out more than a rushed overview of the first day.
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