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Day 14 - July 20th

Friday again, and our final day of process on the grid/typographical hierarchy project for Stacy. Kyle and I brought in 50% scale versions of our posters, and other folk brought in digital and print copies of their own projects. Obviously, another critique ensued. Everyone’s work is looking very good, many of us are moving straight into the refinement stage of our designs. I picked up lots of tips from my classmates and Stacy on how to improve things, but most were so specific as to be uninteresting without a copy of the design to look at.

One interesting thing, was that I learned about proper line tracking and rags, and how to get them right. Stacy looked over my poster, and told me that I would need to do some work to get everything tracked nicely. I had assumed that good tracking meant making everything look more or less justified, but this was not the case. Good tracking on rag-right text is when there is a relatively consistent in-and-out rag (i.e., alternating line lengths in pairs). Tracking in this manner ensures that shapes or smooth curves do not appear at the edges of paragraphs, which is distracting to the reader otherwise. So, I spent more than three hours this afternoon tracking out every line in my poster. Not nearly as tedious as I would have imagined, really.

Now to just get things perfect on Sunday! I have a friend visiting this weekend, so I won’t be able to work until then, but I expect Sunday will be a long day.

July 28th, 2007
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Day 13 - July 19th

We critiqued each other’s sketches today. It looks like we have 5 people doing websites, 5 doing books, and just Kyle and I tackling the posters. Everyone made a good showing - I know now that doing a book or website would in no way have been easier. If anything, the poster, while it contains its own challenges, at least doesn’t require lots and lots of pages.

Things to think about for the poster included ‘how does one set the poster up for scanning?’ People looking at a poster need to be able to jump into it at any point - how can this be aided by typographical hierarchy? Content at the bottom of a poster will make it feel very heavy and weighed down, how can this be avoided? More than anything else be aware of your levels of hierarchy! This is the thing that will draw viewers in.

We then went to work trying to make digital sketches of our work. I’d provide examples, but have decided to protect the anonymity of the author (who’s writing I have scathed). I learned a lot about the history of type from it, even if it was badly structured.

I also learned that digital type faces were created with extra space behind periods, and so there is no reason to knock out a double space after a period when writing for the screen - I will thus try to start using only a single space after my periods. It just feels so wrong though…

July 24th, 2007
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Day 12 - July 18th

Our second day of class with Stacy Rohrbach found us getting into the grit of our assignment. We are to take a badly written 11 page “Brief History of Type,” and create either a poster, website, or book to contain it. Most importantly, we are to use typographical hierarchy to make the essay as readable and legible as we can. I chose the poster, because I have no experience making such things, and it looks like it will be a fun challenge. We must use a poster measuring 30 by 70 inches (orientation is up to us), and use a grid to organize our content. Finally, we cannot use any graphical elements or any typeface other than Meta. Stacy pointed out that it is important to start with the proportions of the final document, and to draw the grid on a separate sheet from the content so they can be viewed separately (what looks good with a grid over it may fall apart once the grid is removed). We then got a few tips on how to start sketching grids and content and dived right in.

I started by outlining the text to get a better idea of its content hierarchy. It was immediately obvious that some elements would need to be rearranged - certain sections were simply out of place logically. Since the paper was on the history of type, with which I have no previous experience, it was rather difficult for me to decide how to revise things. With the help of my classmates and a few iterations of outlining, however, I came up with a good content ordering. In considering the content’s hierarchy, I tried to think about what a poster needs to communicate. I though about how a poster must communicate as much as possible at a glance, as people are unlikely to walk up and read large amounts of text. I think this may have been the most important lesson I learned while doing this project: the ultimate importance of designing a grid/hierarchy that works for your chosen medium.

I spent a good portion of the evening in the studio working on my sketches, and learned a good deal about process. I started by making sketches on paper and just guessing at how much space the content would actually take up. I then moved to printing out some different type sizes on proportionally scaled down copies of the final poster size so I could see how they looked. I decided that type smaller then 14 point would require that the reader be far too close to the poster, and that a vertical poster would only leave an approximately 36 inch tall readable area (Kyle - who is also doing a poster - and I figured this out together by looking at a large poster that was already on the wall). I am thus going to do a horizontal poster and use type of 14 point or larger (Kyle is still going for the vertical, I’ll be interested to see how he pulls it off).

To better see how much space and type I had to deal with, I printed the entire text out in 14 point type and snipped out each individual paragraph. I then measured out a 6 by 2 and a half foot area on a table and began arranging. It quickly became obvious that I had far too many little slips of paper, and had cut them up badly. Next I chopped the whole text into the logical ordering I had earlier decided upon, and printed each section out on it’s own sheet. Laying out my new prints, I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to have nearly as much real estate to work with as I had earlier imagined. Time for more sketches.

I eventually decided on a format based around a time-line, and used a nice grid to order it. You can see them here: sketch, grid. We’ll see how it does in tomorrow’s critique…

July 24th, 2007
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Day 11 - July 17th

Today was our first day with Stacy Rorbach, and a really interesting day it was. Stacy has a background in design (she’s actually a graduate of our program from back-in-the-day), but has focused most of her career on teaching, and I have to say it shows. Stacy has an easygoing and involving manner in the classroom and started teaching us about Grids today. I had never heard of grids before, but found them very interesting. Basically a grid is a method for formatting bodies of type on one or more pages (or posters, or web pages, or whatever). What are they beyond that? Well.. grids. For a very basic grid, imagine a tic-tac-toe board with thick stripes and margins. Such a grid would be made up of 3 columns, 3 rows, and 9 modules (spaces, basically). Each stripe is called a ‘gutter,’ the solid edge of the stripes is a flowline, margins are just what you’d imagine, and a ‘marker’ is a small static field in a margin (such as for page numbers).

There are four basic types of grid, including manuscript (just one large single column of text, implying a story form and/or long passages of dense text), and columnar. Columnar grids contain one or more columns of information, which may or may not be of even sizes. These grids accommodate a large range of information, but think dictionary for a classic example. The third type of grid is called modular, and is made up of many rows or columns. Content laid into these grids may overlap several modules horizontally or vertically. Modular grids are commonly used to format magazines and newspapers, because they allow for the easy insertion of many different pieces of text and or images. The final type of grid is called hierarchical, and is something of a different animal from the first three. The hierarchical grid is not a grid structure so much as a grid method - it is a grid where the format is dictated or informed by the content. Hierarchical grids tend to have lots of floating rectangular panes, which appear in different places on different pages. I initially had a hard time differentiating between modular and hierarchical grids, but believe I now understand it. Basically, modular grids have a set form, hierarchical grids can have any form that is appropriate to the content. It’s tricky. Kind of like trying to describe what house music is - you just get to know through experience.

So why grids? From what I gleaned, grids provide visual continuity, allowing readers/users/victims to know where to look for a given type of information from page to page. For an example of why this is so damn important, check out enaajia.com and try to navigate around and/or find interesting information - I promise there is some there (it utilizes no grid whatsoever). Grids need to be flexible - you can potentially build your grid before you have your content, but you’ll need to be flexible about the grid later on (i.e., able and willing to change it to better suit the content). Stacy also noted that grid types shouldn’t change from page to page unless there is an actual reason for them to do so (don’t mix and match solely for the sake of aesthetics).

After learning all this, we sat down with rulers and pencils in hand, and began tracing grids over pages from magazines. It turns out that Mixmag, cool and British club-culture as they try to be, design within a very strict grid. I would recommend you try it at home folks, here’s an example grid I traced over an old Mixmag page: Grid Practice 1

Finally, we had another discussion about typography, where I picked up a few more tidbits:

• tracking and kerning are more important when working with caps, because caps lost the up and down flow of normal text, and so other variables will need to be adjusted to optimize legibility.
• The aforementioned “up and down” are called ascenders and descenders respectively.
• X-height is the height of a lower case letter - most specifically the height of a lower case “x” (thanks to Alex Cheek for that last one).
• Cap-height is the height of the top of a capital letter.
• Ascenders are often taller than cap-height.
• Point size for a font is measured by the distance from the top of ascenders to the bottom of descenders.
• Don’t differentiate type by a single point size - it looks like a mistake. This particular has rather broader applicability: if things are close to identical, but not quite (e.g., alignment) they just look bad. Make things the same or enhance the differences.

And finally, we got some reading homework tonight! I’m so excited, we haven’t really had any reading yet, and I do enjoy reading. The catch is that we have to examine the reading for inconsistencies in typographical hierarchy - I’m afraid that if I practice this too much reading will be spoiled for me…

July 24th, 2007
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Day 10 - July 16th

Our last day of drawing! I know I shouldn’t sound so excited, but I figured out what my problem is last night (while working on my finished perspective drawing for over an hour): I don’t mind sketching - in fact it can be quite fun. When I have a need to get something out quick, or to rapidly express a visual idea, then drawing is great - what I dislike is spending large amounts of time creating a ‘finished’ drawing. The process is simply monotonous. Oh well, I did it anyway, and it came out rather well (though not perfect). As soon as I can get a scanner I’ll try to get these things I keep talking about up on the site here. I also devised five different physical mock-ups of different candle holders, one of which was really a triumph if I do say so myself. I was thinking about how little candles really don’t serve a purpose other than setting a mood; they simply aren’t large enough to give much light or warmth. So, what is it about candles that sets a mood? The smell perhaps, but the light more than anything else. So I decided to play with light that the candle shines. As all the other materials at hand were flammable, I started by trying to do something interesting by surrounding the candle with wire. While there may have been potential for this to work if I were a jeweler, the truth was that my meager wire-bending skills just weren’t going to give me a light refracting wire mesh. I was ready to give up, when I thought about how corrugated cardboard actually has a very nice pattern when viewed from the side. So I sliced the cardboard into thin strips which I pasted together to make a cute little screen which could be placed in front of the candle (though far enough away to avoid burning down the school). I was rewarded with a great many oohs and aahs when I showed the finished design off to the class in today’s critique. I almost made all the drawing worth it (wink wink).

Though Eric lectured for a little while, class today was mostly spent working to improve our drawings (imagine my joy). One nice tidbit that I picked up, however, was this:

• Design is about discovery - don’t get too caught thinking and/or trying to line everything up and justify your decisions up front.

No doubt this is sage advice, particularly for me - as I have a habit of thinking through things deeply without doing them (hence why I’m a good Chess player, maybe?).

We spent the afternoon finishing work on our logos. I never did come up with something I would call finished, but I have some neat pages full of logo iterations for Monte Cristo (I was hoping to come up with something I could use on a CD cover of my music). I don’t feel too bad though, as this was really just an exercise in using Adobe Illustrator, and we never received any training or advice on how to actually develop a logo (my classmates say it usually takes weeks at a minimum).

Tonight we had the whole night off (no homework!), so I used the evening to work on some music for the first time since coming to Pittsburgh. It was highly therapeutic - I always forget how much I love making music when I don’t do it for a while. Nothing to give you masses yet though - stay tuned.

July 18th, 2007
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Day 9 - July 13th

Our second Friday!  And more drawing class…   We briefly critiqued each other’s perspective-cube drawings - I was surprised to see that we actually have a few very good drawers in the class.  We then spent most of the class discussing our assignment for the weekend - to create a candle holder.  The candle in question was slightly larger than a tea-light, with a tapered glass cup surrounding the wax.  We’ve been told we can use pretty much any materials, but were encouraged to make use of the supplied cardboard, bristol board, tape, and wire.

Given that sculpture was my medium of choice back in the day, I expect I will really enjoy creating little iterative  candle holders.  One challenge we’ve been set is to make the holder out of a single plane of material (no small feat with bristol board).  We are to begin by sketching random ideas, representing at least 5 to 10 separate concepts, and then play around with the materials.  We should focus our exploration around mood, setting, or any other relevant attribute that can help to inform a candle holders form.  We then have to take our best mock-up and do a finished perspective drawing of it (ugh).  Sounds like it’ll be a busy Sunday…

For the afternoon we continued working on our logos.  I’ve been playing around with integrating Japanese text with my DJ name - we’ll see how it comes along!

July 18th, 2007
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Day 8 - July 12th

We had our first of three days with Eric Anderson today. In contrast to the last to faculty members, Eric is a laid-back and soft-spoken industrial designer who is helping teach us how to draw. I must admit that I wasn’t too excited about this - I hate to draw. I don’t mean sketch, sketching is fine and I often do it to lay down or even convey ideas, but I hate sitting down to make a ‘drawing.’ I suppose it all goes back to my high-schooling where we were forced into drawing class for 2 entire afternoons a week all four years, when all I wanted to do was build found-object sculptures. I don’t even mind drawing if its some sort of poster or advertising, I just don’t like to draw for the sake of drawing. I should mention that I can actually draw pretty well (most people who hate to do it do so because they’re insecure about their abilities). The drawing thing had me feeling some things I haven’t felt in a decade when, for the afternoon, we were asked to draw up logo idea for ourselves. I must admit that I got into a bit of a funk. I realized that while I love creative problem solving, I get very frustrated when simply told to be creative with no real end goal. I don’t think this will be a problem for me in the long term as a designer, as I believe in goal directed design, but it’s not helping me right now. Ugh.

Eric talked us though some of the basics of drawing, which were all review for me, before getting into drawing perspective. One interesting point was he mentioned that he think the difference between fine arts and design drawing is that design drawing is an act of constructing information (whereas fine arts is about, well… art). He also defined the term ‘ideation’ for us, which was helpful because I hear this term tossed around a lot on the IxD listserv but have never known exactly what it meant. Ideation is the rapid generation of multiple ideas and/or concepts. He also talked a little bit about concept versus variation, and how one can always come up with new variations on a single concept, but a broader base of multiple concepts is preferable in the early stages of design.

For homework we’ve been asked to draw a series of cubes in a composition in order to get us practiced with perspective. I’m really not looking forward to doing this, but I’m going to take that as a sign that I should really work hard at it - if I dislike it that may mean I have even more to learn (even if I really don’t think so…).

In other news I had a great time hanging out with 8 of my classmates last night. I’m really amazed by what an interesting array of liberal viewpoints we have represented. I’ve gotten used to liberals all sitting around agreeing on everything, but we have such a range (from the radical left all the way to true moderate-swing-voter types), that we can really have some interesting discussions. We do all hate Bush though, thank God. I just can’t get over what a great group of people they assembled for this program!

July 12th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Design Fundamentals, CMU | 1 Comment »  

Day 7 - 7/11

Our second (and last) day of digital photography with Dylan today. We spent the first part of class in the building’s lighting studio where we talked through the basics of photographic lighting. Most of it was review for me, having learned these things as a teenager helping my mother out at photo shoots. One juicy bit of advice I hadn’t heard before was to put some sort of reflector over your on-camera flash (e.g., taping some scoth tape across the face of the flash), thereby reducing the otherwise horribly harsh light of the standard camera flash.

We then spent the second half of class looking at everyones series’ of photographs that we did for homework. Lots of neat stuff. In general, everyone had a few great shots and a few mediocre ones (myself included), but then we’re designers not photographers, right? For my series, I was thinking about how being in school again kind of makes me feel like a kid, and so I tried to take shots from a child’s perspective, and which had something of the dreamy qualities of old memories. Click here to take a look at my slide show.

For the afternoon we began working with Adobe Illustrator. I’ve played with Illustrator before, and feel that it’s one of the most frustrating programs I’ve ever used. My classmates say it’ll get better when I get used to it, but I think any software that angers me so much is simply badly designed. Why can’t I select a point by clicking on it? Why?! I think Flashes (cut-down) vector editing spoiled me, as I find it much simpler. I put together the following humorous image using illustrator:

July 11th, 2007
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Day 6 - July 10th

We had our first class with Dylan today. Dylan is a fine arts photographer who also acts as the CMU Design digital media expert (read: has access to every bit of technology in the building). Dylan proved to be another fine teacher - fast talking but clear, full of nervous energy but engaging. He gave us a nice long lecture on the basics of digital photography and an interesting slide show covering trends in contemporary photography. While all my recent notes have basically been my notes, today’s will be even more so.

Vocabulary

• ISO - Film (or sensor) sensitivity to light. Faster ISO’s need less light to do the job, but also tend to produce more digital noise. Slower ISO’s produce a smoother tonal range but tend to get blurry.
• F-Stop/Aperture - How open the camera’s shutter gets (think maximum diameter). The higher this number, the smaller the aperture. Higher F-stops need more light, but give broader depth of field (can focus on closer and farther objects simultaneously).
• Shutter Speed - The amount of time that the shutter stays open. This ranges from as long as you like, to thousandths of a second (the numbers are quoted in fractions of a second). Shutter speed numbers basically act opposite F-stops: higher shutter speeds need more light, slower one’s can get decent pictures in low light. If you move up in shutter speed, you generally want to go down with your F-stop to keep things balanced (though most digital cameras do all this for you).
• Focal Length - How wide your lens is. A 28mm lens is considered wide-angle, and will tend to stretch things out a bit. 50mm is normal, and 85mm is a telephoto lens, which will tend to compact space.
• White Balance - Different light sources have different temperatures, and thus produce differently colored ambient light that we generally want to adjust for. Dylan told us to get in the habit of not using auto-white balance on our cameras, as it tends to not work well.
• Resolution - the whole mega-pixel thing, not news to anyone. One thing to note here is that with film, resolution degrades smoothly as print size increases, with digital, you simply hit a threshold afterwards things just fall apart.

And a few other notes from the lecture:

• If your camera supports it, you should always shoot RAW format, which records all the data the camera takes in at the time of the photo (as opposed to JPEG, which loses data in the compression).
• It’s better to adjust for color/saturation etc. during the RAW to Photoshop conversion, than afterwards (as I have always done… oops).

For homework we’ve been asked to take a series of 10 to 12 photos that tell some sort of story or express a mood. I’m excited about doing this: I think I’m going to take some photos that try to evoke how being a student again makes me feel younger and brings back some of that ’sense of wonder’ that children are so prone to. I’ll post the photos tomorrow.

For the afternoon software class we were asked to make a poster advertising our cell phone. I think the idea was that this would get us working in both inDesign and Photoshop at the same time. I decided to take this a rather humorous route and came up with the following (which is secretly the reason I chose my phone):

Not my best typography work, but funny, eh?

July 10th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Design Fundamentals, CMU, Photography | 2 Comments »  

Day 5 - July 9th

I think that we were all a little disappointed that today would be our last day with Karen Moyer. Between her deep and broad design knowledge, unstoppable exuberance, and impish grin she has made us all very happy to be studying at CMU.

The day began with a critique of our last two typographical hierarchy exercises: composition and ‘final.’ For the composition exercise we were to take our favorite version of the poster we’ve been working on for the last week and set it into a rectangular field of up to 11″x17″. We had to print on 11″x17″ paper and then go at it with an Exacto knife, which I hadn’t done since 2D Design in high school, but it was fun. I think the main point of this exercise (besides the obvious), was to get us thinking about how we use and perceive negative/white space. I was actually pretty happy with my compositions, but made a stupid mistake, leaving one line in a slightly larger stroke width than I should have (or was allowed within the assignment’s parameters). Karen at first started to talk well of my efforts, but then noticed my error and essentially gave them a “blech.” I think this may prove to be my most important design lesson today: careless errors can quickly get an otherwise fine design solution thrown to the wayside.

For the second exercise of the day, in which we were finally allowed to edit the text we were working on a bit and utilize as many typographic variables as we felt necessary, I had fortunately not made the same mistake. I was happy to see that most of the class had come up with fine solutions to our problem, and all of my classmates have come a very long way in the past week (myself included). I couldn’t help but be even more happy that Karen seemed to consider my solution the best in the class. I’d post the finished product here, but for two issues. First, it really wouldn’t look very special to anyone who doesn’t understand the amount of work and iterative design that went into it; and second because Karen has apparently been using this assignment for many years, and I can’t help but think of it as her proprietary thing.

After critiquing our work, Karen went on to explain how all of the exercises we’ve been using are useful for real projects. Simple as the exercises were, they can be a great way to arrive at typographical design solutions in the future. She also explained how different solutions will generally fall into two different categories: majorly different alternatives and variations (subtler changes within a given alternative). She pointed out that it is always important to try both of these to find the best solution.

I asked Karen how to know when you are done working on a solution. The question was in my mind because last night I was on version 14 of my final piece and not stopping, when I asked one of my classmates for advice on what to do next, to which he responded “You’re done.” Karen responded with “Thank God for deadlines.” She said that you’re never done, that there’s always one more thing you can do or try. You simply need to take the reflective knowledge you gain and apply it to your next project. In this way I think design is a lot like music. When I work on a song I always know I can keep going back and hammering at it some more, but most of the time I’d rather move on. When I go to the next piece however, I always have some new insight I’ve gained from the last.

Karen finished the day with a lecture on typography; more specifically readability and legibility, from which I pulled the following tidbits:

• Never use serif and sans-serif fonts together.
• Auto-tracking is pretty good - you may find that you rarely have to make manual adjustments here.
• Kerning takes a very long time, and is usually only really important with display size fonts and larger (14+ pts).
• Kerning is done where ‘counterform’ appears large. ‘Form’ is the space underneath a letter, and counterform is the space above and around it.
• The idea behind manual kerning is that we want to preserve the regular visual rhythm of letters, and so may need to pull some closer together.
• To decide where to kern, find the optical gray and adjust for maximum evenness.
• Temporarily tracking out text a bit can make it easier to know where to kern.
• When designers use tracking, it is generally done quite purposefully - it is not a normal adjustment.
• Readability refers to how a text appears when skimmed or glanced at. Do the important parts stand out? Does the text look enticing enough to make the reader look deeper?
• Legbility refers to the little issues of deciphering individual bits of text.
• Normal flush-left, rag-right text is generally the most legible.
• Justified text requires longer lines with more characters to avoid ‘rivers.’
• Conversely, if line length is too long, it becomes difficult for readers to keep track of what line they are on.
• Rivers impede legibility.
• Full line spaces (blank lines) are ok in text-sizes, but tend to look too big in display sizes.
• The minimum number of characters/spaces/punctuation required to justify a line is about 40, and 55-70 is optimal.
• If you want to justify but have only 40 or so characters/spaces/punctuation per line, it’s better to move to a smaller font to allow more characters/line (or use a condensed font).
• When you have more than about 70 characters/line, you need to add additional line space to preserve legibility (regardless of justification).
• 2 points of leading is normal for text.
• Normal stroke weights for text are 45 to 55 (in Univers anyway - this depends on the font).
• When putting something together, start with the body copy, and build hierarchy out from there.
• If all else is equal, justified and rag-right are of equal legibility - but justified text is rarely done well, and so rag-right tends to be easier to read.
• Caption text, due to its small size, often requires a little extra leading (even though line lengths tend to be small).
• Title text doesn’t necessarily require a larger type size, as long as there is some signal of its importance.

Whew! Quite a list, eh? For the afternoon we just played around in Photoshop, working on learning it’s ins and outs. I threw together the following rather cool image from a pic of a long-haired long-horned bull:

And this one was from a scan of my sunglasses

:

July 9th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Typography, Design Fundamentals, CMU, Photography | No Comments »