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Day 4 - July 6th

Friday at last! Though it’s been a short week (only four days of class), we spend 6 hours a day in class, and I’d forgotten how exhausting being a student can be! At least I can catch up with my blog!

We had another critique of our updated typographical hierarchy projects this morning. Everyone is improving quickly (though some were great to start) and it’s interesting to see how we all start to come up with more similar solutions as time goes on. I think that this must be a sure sign that we’ve collectively familiarized ourselves with the content and are fully in the development stage of our design process. Class was a bit longer today, and as a result I came away with many more juicy bits of design wisdom:

• Value is placed on efficiency. Handling the whole problem in the fewest moves is most often the best path. - I am trying to relate this to the concept of simplicity, but I’m not sure they’re the same. Rather, I imagine that efficiency is doing as little as necessary, whereas simplicity is appearing to have done as little as possible. I’ll have to think on this more.
• When new variables are added into a design problem, make sure to look for new opportunities/discoveries that were not previously available.
• Try to make discoveries. Once made, attack them with good judgment, so that only the truly worthwhile remain.
• Be careful that heavy stroke-weights don’t push lighter fonts into the background. - This was a problem with my own design, where bold text was causing the viewer to ignore lighter text, which seemed to receded into the negative space.
• Two bold lines stacked on top of each other can be a good way to demarcate the most important single line in a piece.
• An unnatural typographic design can work because it is odd (thus garnering attention), but won’t always. It will, however, always make for a harder problem to solve.
• Too many ‘outs and ins’ obscure the norm (think margins). Think about clarifying the norm so that exceptions become clear.
• Try to imagine text as being hung from the top, rather then built up from the bottom. - I think that this is referring to the need for delicate balance rather than weighty and architectural structure.
• Left dictating right, fits the English/Western mental model. - Because we read from left to right, we expect type on the left to pertain to text on the right (where present).

We also received a short lecture on typographic composition. Karen explained that eye-tracking has shown that people looking at a blank square or rectangle will come to rest there eyes at a point slightly above the center of the shape. We also tend to look to the top-left quadrant of a shape first for text (because this is how we read), so if text is inserted in that quadrant we get overkill and viewers will tend to ignore the right hand quadrants. Finally, we covered the long list of typographic variables:

• Structure - Karen described this as a ‘topological map of type.’ I’m going to have to research this, because I’m afraid I didn’t understand.
• Proportion - the height to width ratio of type.
• Shape - Serifs, etc. The detailed shape of letters.
• Weight - stroke weight (boldness).
• Size - font size.
• Tone/Value - some discussion ensued regarding the meaning of this term. In the end the consensus seemed to be that it refers to gray scale ‘color.’
• Color - Encompassing hue, value, and saturation/intensity and luminosity.
• Texture - just what it sounds like, but how do you describe this?
• Position - the position of text relative to a format/composition.
• Orientation - left to right, upside down, diagonal, etc. Karen also told us that left-to-right oriented letters arranged in a vertical to form a word (as often seen on large store sign in urban areas), is her pet peeve, and we should never do it or we’re going to hell. I must admit that I’m surprised by the religious implications of typography! (mind you this is a running joke in our class)

For the afternoon we worked a bit more on our Pulp Fiction projects, and were treated to a wonderful lecture on the history of modern typography by my classmate Alex. Alex is a great speaker, extremely knowledgeable, and the biggest font-geek I’ve ever met. I love this place!

Here are my latest iterations of the Pulp fiction design. I think things got cheesier, but my more design savvy classmates seemed to prefer these to yesterday’s…

July 6th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Typography | 2 Comments »  

Day 3 - July 5th

We all enjoyed the holiday, and had a great time watching fireworks go off all over the city from a classmate’s rooftop. Back Thursday morning, we sat down for our first critique. Our assignment had required that we make our assigned piece of text clearer using only one (and later two) typographic variables at a time (e.g., line spacing, font stroke weight, and multiple flush-left margins). We all pinned our three best attempts to the wall and Karen explained which were better and why.

Among the things I learned:

• The degree of contrast present in a text is important to make it engaging. This was particularly relevant to our assignment because we are preparing an 8.5″x11″ text-only poster that might hang in a campus hallway.
• Watch out for ‘masses’ of text when dealing with two stroke-weights. These masses quickly blur into a haze of gray.
• Be wary of the ‘zebra-effect.’ That is, when there is too much quick alteration back-and-forth between strong and light stroke weights (or whatever), it becomes unclear which (light or dark) is the norm, and removes meaning from the entire piece. Making the norm of a piece clear is necessary to elucidate variation - it is important to view a piece as a gestalt

And a few of my own thoughts on what I learned during the critique:

• Looking at printed copies together simultaneously is extremely important to finding the best aspects of each. These best aspects may often need to be combined before the optimal solution is reached.
• Print it out! Trying to imagine what a typographic piece will look like when viewing it on a computer screen alone is simply ineffective.

And finally, a little typographic vocabulary that I probably should have known already:

• Tracking - All the space between letters evenly spread on a line.
• Kerning - the size of a single space between letters.
• Leading - Line height, or the space between lines of text.

For the afternoon we began playing around with some quotes from Pulp Fiction, using inDesign to create an expressive and artistic take on the quotes. I’m new to all this, but I think my first iteration turned out pretty well:

For homework we’ll be working on the same typographical hierarchy project, but will start to combine variables we previously used only in isolation.

July 6th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Typography | 2 Comments »  

Day 2 - July 3rd

We began our first project today - exploring Typographical Hierarchy. Karen began the class be explaining to us the concept of “Visualogic.” She told us that we can imagine a spectrum for designing a typographic (or other) communication, with pure logic on one end, and pure eye-candy on the other. Our goal as designers is to find the magic-middle where visual and logical meet to form a cohesive, meaningful whole.

Our first project is to take a text message we are given and use very simple typography to present the meaning clearly. Clearly in this case refers to being easy to read (i.e., not requiring multiple readings and avoiding psychological excise). The first step, we learned, is to analyze the given text (familiarization) so that we, as the designers, understand the intended meaning and various parts. It is our job to then digest this structure and hand it to the audience in optimal form.

We also briefly covered the criteria for any design solution. These criteria are outwardly simple, but may in fact prove to be difficult: a solution should be appropriate, engaging, and clear. Appropriate in that any given solution must fit the given constraints and accomplish the stated objective. Engaging, meaning that people must want to to view/use/interact with a solution or it will not be utilized. And clear in that a solution must not be psychologically taxing or it will not be effective (people don’t stop to read dense bricks of text stapled to a telephone pole).

July 6th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Typography | No Comments »  

Day 1 - July 2nd

Day one as an interaction designer in training! We were given our laptop’s today. I was a bit disappointed that we got 4-year-old Powerbooks, but they’ve promised us brand-spankin’ new ones in the fall. Beyond that, I’m blogging from my new Mac right now, so it can’t be all bad. Getting used to OS-X is clearly going to be a challenge, but I think I’ll be up to par withing a couple of weeks at most.

We were introduced to the first of the six professors who will be guiding us over the summer today. Karen Moyer is (from what I’m told) a very well respected designer, and she is clearly a wonderful teacher - brimming with what I can only call sprightly energy.

We played wonderful game/exercise where Karen put several hundred hand-tools of various sorts on the floor and had us work to organize them on the floor in a way that was visually meaningful and communicative. The point of the exercise was to elucidate the basic design process: familiarization, development, and refinement. This played out by getting to know the tools (i.e. figuring out what the heck a lot of them were/did), developing a strategy (sorting the tools into domains such as kitchen gadgets, art tools, etc.), and finally laying them all out in a manner that communicated the tools’ use (where possible).

I also picked up some quotes that sounded like design truisms, so I copied them down and will immortalize them here:

• Form carries meaning, space carries meaning. - I think this means that we must be aware of both the form of an artifact, and it’s placement in relation to other artifacts (thus space can give meaning). This is easily seen in much graphic design work, but is just as important to other areas of design.
• How will micro decisions affect the macro? Don’t let little things overtake the big picture. - I believe that this refers to the fact that the devil in the details can obscure the meaning of the larger picture. It is easy to imagine an overly ornate piece of text drawing attention away from the rest of a typographic design piece.
• Discover what the content wants to be. Discover rather then invent. - I think this means that we must be careful not to give our own meaning to artifacts, but should try to find an artifact’s inherent meaning/use/purpose and clarify that.

The afternoon was spent with a short review of Dreamweaver (not so necessary for me) and my first look at Adobe inDesign. inDesign looks like a formidable piece of software to learn, but my previous experience with other (similar) Adobe interfaces should help me along.

July 6th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals | No Comments »  

Week 1 in Pittsburgh

So, Ive completed my first week of classes at CMU! So far everything is going swimmingly. I have many wonderful classmates, who I will no doubt come to be good friends with, I’m already learning worlds of knowledge I hadn’t previously imagined, and best of all, I’m not in Des Moines!

In total, there are twelve of us taking the summer course in Design Fundamentals (and the attached ’software boot-camp’ sessions), and I must congratulate CMU on assembling an incredibly diverse range of people who bring a wonderful selection of skills and experiences to the group. Among my classmates are professional web designers, graphic designers, typography experts, non-profiteers, artists, musicians, and techies, as well as a few more I can’t remember.

I came here planning to blog my class notes and such, but have sadly been procrastinating. Meanwhile, one of my classmates Kyle (www.kylevice.com) is already beating out a great blog of our daily activities, that I can’t hope to beat (particularly because he’s an experienced designer and his blog is simply nicer than mine). However, I’m still hoping to try and will follow this post with a few more cataloging what we’ve done each day.

Pittsburgh itself is great. The weather’s been spectacular, the city feels safe and friendly, and there are buses to catch all over the place. My new apartment is also awesome (though I miss my wife very much - she’ll be joining me in 3 more weeks), and it was a joy to hang out with my two friends Gary and Matt for a week after the move. I’ll post some photo’s of the new pad soon, but am getting a bit behind with my camera work, focusing more on homework at this point.

In conclusion, life is good, and when Emily joins me things just might near perfect!

July 6th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Pittsburgh | No Comments »