Understanding Comics

This reading was a little bit of information overload for me. There were a thousand visuals and the text was jumping all over the place, being in cartoon form. There were a lot of ideas thrown around, but here’s what stuck for me…

 When you turn an image into a cartoon, you are “amplifying” its meaning because you’re stripping the image down to its essential meaning in a way realism cannot.  It focuses you on the idea. We also see ourselves in cartoons, viewer identification has helped cartoon break into the world of pop culture.  All of the things we experience in life can be split into two categories, the concept and the senses. And words are the “ultimate abstraction”. Writing is perceived, you have to decode it, but pictures are received and the messages is instantaneous. We live in a “symbol-oriented culture”, where iconography is a form of universal communication. In the end, images only have the power that we give them.

Review of Writer’s Toolbox

From this reading I learned about the powers of writing. Writing can help you in the creative process, from mind-mapping to writing out ideas. Mind mapping has been used by Da Vinci, Picasso, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and many more. Mind maps can help you see patterns emerge and concepts that might need to be remapped. Concept maps are similar and help you make a more thorough analysis of “conceptual relationships and meanings” and help with “cognitive organization” by showing the relationships of concepts from general to specific and help greatly as a jumping-off point for future writing.  Freewriting focuses on a specific idea and helps put thoughts and ideas down, it is similar to journaling, and helps stimulate more productive thinking and writing. Brainwriting is essentially brainstorming, it helps you get many ideas out and on paper. This especially helps people who would rather write ideas down than present them in front of a group with speech. Word lists help us with idea generation and give us a sense of accomplishment. Writing also helps in the next phase after creative in communicating the idea, which leads to public writing on “proposals, project briefs, cover letters and even blog entries”.

Objectified

This was a really exciting film to watch, I had heard about it a lot before and seen clips from it previously. I think the main part that intrigued me, and its probably the same for most of the students, was just being able to see designers at work and get to hear from them because you so rarely get to hear from designers like that. With fashion all you hear about is the designers, but no so much with industrial and graphic design, there are less fan clubs, press coverage and prestige. So this was a fun documentary to watch.

I really do think I learned a lot, if not more than anything else just from being exposed to all of these designers I hadn’t heard of yet. I typed furiously to get all of the names down, and now have a great resource to go back to and look up their work. I also got to hear all of these designers’ personal philosophies, which was great and inspiring. I think it is always inspiring to see other people get where you want to go.

            This movie focused on industrial design but the ideas taken from it can be applied to all fields of design, and all fields of work because some of what people said was just advice in general. From Dieter Rams I will always think “Users react positively when things are clear and understandable”. From Jonathan Ive I will remember to, “get design out of the way”, make it so clear and simple that people don’t even need to think about it and the design couldn’t be any other way. From the Bouroullec brothers I know that as a designer I need to help people organize, from Marc Newson to look into the future, from Paola Antoneli that I should make good design available for everyone. From Bill Moggridge to remember the interactive design and digital software is as much as important as the physical design. And finally from Tim Brown, we need to be sustainable, we know people won’t keep things forever so we need to make a way to keep it safe for disposal or reusable in the environment.

            There are a million other tidbits from this movie, a million things that you could make into mantras from these designers. I think it was just an inspiring film. I honestly can’t wait to watch it again.

Make It Better: Project Brief

For this project we have been asked to select an object that we think is lacking in design, that costs under five dollars, and redesign it to make it better. The object could not work how it is supposed to, be really hideous or possibly both. For this project my team has decided to fix a cutting board that lacked in functionality.

Pinspiration

For several years now, my Pinterest account has held a sizable amount of my design inspiration. For this good design project I have been scouring the “Illustrations & Posters” sections as well as my personal design board for inspiration. I’ll probbaly have a panic attack if the website is ever shut down because of the sheer amount of time and data I have put onto my account. What can I say? Some would say this is wasted time but I think its a great resource. Pinterest gets you onto other design blogs and boards, and is kind of just a venue for people to put up all of the amazing work that they do. Pinterest is a great way to get inspiration and find new sources.  

Good Design Poster

Here are some screenshots of the work going up to- and my final poster.

Color Theory

From the color theory presentation, I learned a lot of theories and strategies of using color to create unity. Hue is the family name of a color, such as green, red, or blue and it carries expressive aspect. Value is lightness or darkness of a clolor. Tints are colors at the top. Shades (mixed with white) are colors at the bottom (mixed with black,grey or opposite color on wheel) and shde also create 3 dimensional form. Achromatic is black and white,  which represents truth or honesty. Chroma is the purity of the color, ranging from strong chroma- straight out of the tube- to weak chroma that looks very greyed out. 

We also learned ways to use all of this to make a good palette. For example, color balance states that we intuitively we react better to the darker value being dominant. Color unity states that artists and designers employ color unity strategies to convey an idea more clearlyand helps define what to look at. A limited palette could also create unity. One of the best ways to create unity is by using hue, value or chroma dominance (different shades of one color). Transitions in hue, value or chroma create color unity by eliminating big visual leaps, showing the viewers eye path through the picture plane. All of these strategies help designers keep their color use clean and valuable.