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Multimedia use is a great method to attract a variety of audiences. It adds depth to the message or story you are trying to share by adding more context, providing a mix of text, visuals and/ or audio. This can be done in many ways: a text heavy document with images/ videos added in, an image or video can have audio dubbed on top, text can be put overtop of an image or video, or all three can be incorporated together. A good example of this would be news channels. The news has a news anchor to audibly share the detailed story, and is supported with visuals specific to the information and text headers to catch viewers attention with a brief hook description. Another example would be how-to videos on youtube. Creators often post videos of how to do the task, focusing on the item and the person’s hands. To have a clear and detailed description of what they are doing, they add audio over top of the video that can also be written as subtitles. To add more clarity to the video, creators often add symbols and text to emphasize the key steps or details such as arrows and labels.

For my daily creates, I did not follow any prompts from the website because all of the ones I looked at didn’t incorporate the multimedia aspect. Instead, I went through my camera roll and added audio and text to a photo and a video. I also drew on top of another photo. I was just exploring some fun ways to incorporate multimedia into everyday photos and videos, adding depth to the photos/ videos to make them more interesting. As I mentioned in the paragraph above, there are more practical and useful ways to incorporate multimedia, but I wanted to focus on more day-to-day, average use of multimedia.

My use of multimedia in these daily creates connects directly to Mayer’s principles, especially in how different forms of media can work together to strengthen meaning. By adding audio and text to my photos and videos, I was applying the Multimedia Principle, combining visual and verbal information to create a clearer, more engaging message than either mode could provide on its own. I was also mindful of keeping each piece simple and focused, which aligns with the Coherence Principle, including only the elements that supported the main idea of the image rather than adding unnecessary decoration. Pairing visuals with spoken explanations reflects the Modality Principle as well, since distributing information across both visual and auditory channels helps reduce cognitive overload. Even though my goal wasn’t instructional, these small creative edits show how Mayer’s principles can enhance everyday media by making it more meaningful and easier for viewers to interpret.