LonelyStreets.com
Days 22 Onward
As you, my dear readers, will have noticed, I’ve been a bit lazy regarding the blog this last few weeks. Continuing that trend, I will now proceed to sum up the rest of the summer course in a single post. And don’t expect me to get any better in the future - everyone keeps warning us that time will have an all new premium starting tomorrow (the first day of our first fall semester).
Starting The last day of July we had 3D interaction design with Steve Stadelmier, a well respected industrial designer. Steve was a real hoot - one of those profs who is just incredible relaxed, interested, and funny. Steve’s project for us was - get this - candle holders! Apparently (according to Steve) Eric stole the project from him, and so we did it again. The focus was different this time around though - concentrating much more on the interaction, and avoiding drawing almost entirely (yay!). Steve was full of great quotes, most of which I no longer have the impetus to type up, but here are a few favorites:
“I believe that we live in a bifurcated world. We demand much greater richness in play and our personal life than in our work.” This is obviously something to be lamented, and hopefully something that we designers can avoid and/or change.
“When we design, we must accept 10,000 years of human history and still design for new technology.” Our existence is full of already learned activiteis and ‘trained’ metaphors. As interaction designers we must take advantage of these things and use them to bring the New within the human experience, thus creating artifacts and experiences that can be learned easily and enjoyed thoroughly. That’s what I think he meant anyway.
And my favorite: “Pimp My Ride is actually another one of those resources that you shouldn’t let go by.” I have absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but it’s a helluva sound bite!
I decided to again focus on the quality of light as the aspect of a candle holder that would best facilitate interaction between diners at a dinner table, and finished with a nice little prototype that I can no longer find the photo of. Oh well.
After our time with Steve the final portion of our summer class was with Stacy again, who assigned us our final project: to pick a single word and create an interactive Flash piece and an After Effects movie which would express the meaning of the word using nothing but text. I developed the following two pieces, of which the movie is certainly the better. The Flash piece was, however, a triumph of coding for me, as I had never previously built anything so advanced. (If you die in the flash game, simply close it and re-open it to start over. If it’s a bit slow I apologize, it was not optimized for web delivery. Also a hint: don’t fall on the A’s). The movie is a pretty large file, so I haven’t put it up yet, thought I plan to later.
August 26th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Flash, Typography, Design Fundamentals, CMU | No Comments »
Days 16-21, July 24th to 30th
We spent the week working with Bob Swinehart, an information designer by trade. Bob assigned us the task of redesigning the US Post Office’s Change of Address form, a paid project he had personally worked on several years ago.
We spent our first day in small groups wandering around campus with the current form, accosting strangers and asking them to fill out the form while we watched them. It was immediately apparent that there are indeed many problems with the current form. None of the subjects we tested filled out the form completely (there’s a secret, yet entirely necessary, couple of lines on the back of the form that everyone missed, myself included). The current form is also too small and dense, and badly organized, resulting in people filling out parts they shouldn’t, and skipping entries that they should have filled.
We also spent a great deal of time listening to Bob retell the slightly garbled story of how he and his team went about redesigning the form, and what constraints were placed upon them. Our assignment is thus to redesign the form while working within the same constraints that Bob had when his team redesigned it (a design which the post office later decided not to use for somewhat complex reasons). I spent a great deal of time familiarizing myself with the current hierarchy of the form and then moved to sketching by hand and then sketching within InDesign.
Unfortunately, Bob spent very little time actually talking to us about how to design a form, and so we were largely left to our own devices (though he spent each class day critiquing what we had done). Overall, I think that the most interesting thing I learned was that designing something that should be treated flippantly too well, can result in that artifact not being used for its intended purpose. To elucidate, on our last day, Bob showed us the final designs that he and his team had developed. Apparently the new form was nice enough that users, when tested, did not want to put it through the mail system open faced (as with the current card). The form apparently led users to feel that the information they were inserting onto it was more important, and thus needed to be protected for privacy reasons, though they didn’t feel the same way about the same information when writing it on the older, trashy looking form. I think that this dilemma really exemplifies why it is important to design with context in mind - if you design a trashy post office form to look like an expensive brochure from the bank, people will treat it more like the latter, regardless of the information contained therein.
Here’s my final redesign:
August 1st, 2007
Posted by Paul in Typography, Design Fundamentals, CMU | No Comments »
Day 15 - July 23rd
We all brought in our final Posters/Books/Websites today for a final look-see and critique. I was unable to do as much on mine as I had anticipated due to a little snafu on Saturday. Kyle called me up (thank God) to let me know that Kinko’s, where I had planned to get my poster printed on Sunday night, wanted $10 per square foot to print our posters - which means I would have had to shell out $150 to get a single black and white poster printed. Fortunately a place on the south side called Copies at Carsons was doing the same thing for $0.65 per square foot. The down side was that Carsons isn’t open on Sundays. So off I ran to get my poster printed early, even though I would have like to work on it quite a bit more. Oh well, it saved me over $140.
Everyone made a nice showing with their final designs. Kyle did a great job with his poster, but the cake was stolen by Phil, who designed his entire book using a modular grid system that placed the content beautifully. I realized a mistake in my own piece when Stacy asked me where the author’s name was. I responded with “oops.” I think she thought I did a reasonably good job regardless, which I believe as well. If I had only had Sunday to work too it would have been great. Tonight, another night with no homework. So, of course, I went to the studio and spent hours beginning my process book, which involved lots of scanning. However, these scans allow me to now present the following images from our section on drawing which I couldn’t put up earlier:
Perspective Drawing 1
Perspective Drawing 2
Perspective Drawing 3
Perspective Drawing 4
Perspective Drawing 5
Candle Holder Thumbnails
Finished Candle Holder Design
August 1st, 2007
Posted by Paul in Typography, Design Fundamentals, CMU | 2 Comments »
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
Posted by Paul in Typography, Design Fundamentals, CMU | No Comments »
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
Posted by Paul in Typography, Design Fundamentals, CMU | No Comments »
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
Posted by Paul in Typography, Design Fundamentals, CMU | No Comments »
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
Posted by Paul in Typography, Design Fundamentals, CMU | No Comments »
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
Posted by Paul in Design Fundamentals, CMU | No Comments »
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
Posted by Paul in Design Fundamentals, CMU | No Comments »
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 »