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Maps!
I’m taking a really cool class called Mapping and Diagramming with Prof. Karen Moyer. For our first assignment, Karen asked us to redesign a terrible map she found in the design building (many years ago). The map was put up to announce the closing of one of the main exits from the building, and looked like this:
Note that, among other things, this map is of the third floor of the building! It also didn’t have any exits labeled, though you can tell where they would be from my scribbling. I think I was pretty successful in fixing things up. Take a look:
A few notes on process: I chose a gray background because the sign would be hung on a white wall, and I wanted it to stand out. I didn’t want it to look too good though (because it will be in the Design building, where things that look really good are, as a rule, announcements of speakers and presentations), so I left a white border, as if it came out of an office printer. I also chose Helvetica for the font because we are used to seeing the big ‘H’ on street signs and other such official notifications. Finally, I included the street and UC building in order to offer context and orientation to people who are less good at spatially positioning themselves.
January 26th, 2008
Posted by Paul in CMU, Communication Design, Typography | No Comments »
Last Week’s Projects
Just because I love to share, and because I’m enjoying cataloging my own design development, Here are the three projects that made last week so work-heavy.
First, and most importantly, my self portrait poster. This poster was printed at 44″ wide by 33″ tall, so you won’t be able to see it all that well in this pdf, but please take a look anyway. It’s self-explanatory for the most part, you just have to examine it for a little while. I spent a couple weeks developing this, and I’m quite fond of the results.
And next up, my ambient device. The file here is a Flash slide show I showed while giving a spoken presentation (which I don’t have the energy to type up here). Suffice it to say that This is an ambient device to help folk remember when to take their medication. Just click to move through the slides - this requires Flash Player 9 or higher.
And finally, my new MIDI controller prototype. I would have liked to actually build this prototype physically, but it was made for the Design Computing class, so Flash it was. The idea here is that current MIDI controllers have lots of different controls (faders, wheels, knobs, etc.), but we can generally only adjust one with each hand at once. It seems to me that it might be helpful to have a controller that combines a number of different interactions, allowing for independent adjustment of separate MIDI parameters simultaneously with a single hand. This control thus combines a fader, a knob, and a velocity sensitive pad-control in a single device - I know I’d use it.
September 22nd, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Flash, Music and Movies, Typography | No Comments »
Helvetica
Emily and I went to see the movie “Helvetica” last night. Helvetica is a documentary about the history of the type face by the same name. A great movie that provided an interesting look into a narrow sub-sect of design culture. I am not generally able to identify specific type faces, but I’m going to try to spot Helvetica now (it’s apparently ubiquitous). I never previously realized how dominant Helvetica is in corporate logos, but the movie provided more than enough examples (Target, Crate&Barrel, American Airlines, and on and on…).
In other news I have a big weekend - In the next couple of days I need o finish my self-portrait poster (which I restarted last Tuesday when I decided my old concept was trash), design an ambient device of some sort, prototype a new MIDI controller I’ve been ideating, and (of course) do some more incredibly difficult readings for Dick Buchanan’s awesome seminar. What this means, however, is that I should finally have some interesting work to put up here by next weekend! Oh, and there’s a big Mexican-themed birthday party for two of my classmates tonight, so I just spent the last hour making fresh salsa (and my hands now smell like an interesting mix of garlic and cilantro…).
September 15th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Music and Movies, Typography | No Comments »
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 CMU, Design Fundamentals, Flash, Typography | 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
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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 CMU, Design Fundamentals, Typography | 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
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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
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Typography | No Comments »