Simplicity

Design is only good if it has a purpose. It is so prevalent in our environment that we often forget how important it is. The simplest, most recognizable icons can be found in our streets. Imagine if something you designed became an integral, effective part of every person's daily commute.

The purpose is a universally quick read. It is simple, effective, and completely inescapable.

I am very fascinated with the way designers can use signs to control people. I have found that airport signs are the only way I can get from one place to another. There is no other way I could navigate through those crazy rat mazes.

The way that a sign is displayed communicates a lot about the message.
This sign for a chiropractor, with gold leafing and formal typography
says that “we mean business.” However, the neon sign below

communicates an entirely, though no less effective, message to potential clients. The image is not about class or subtlety. The message is meant to be read, at any cost.

Rules, Rules, Rules

“The advantage of rules is that they prevent mistakes. The disadvantage is that they prevent discovery.” These words, written by Matthew Carter in Paul Felton’s The Ten Commandments of Typography, resonate very strongly with me. Despite my efforts, I find that I am more concerned about screwing up than I should be. The more prevalent fear in great designers is a fear of not creating. If one does not take risks, one never makes anything remotely new. I worry that my work has become a series of safe decisions that happen to be visually harmonious.

Although it may seem to others that I take risks, I am actually very comfortably resting in mediocrity. Every day I do things that may seem scary to others. Public speaking, putting myself out there and even being alone - these are the common fears of people unlike me. I, on the other hand, primarily fear rejection.

I have seen people put their heard and sould into their “baby,” whether that be their work or something else. I have seen some people rise to success by investing everything into what they do. I have also seen people get their heart broken when someone tells them that they have an ugly baby.

I, on the other hand, don’t feel that I have ever done something so risky. My actions are responses to those around me. In a way this is good. I plan based on the situation and act accordingly.

Nevertheless, there is something missing in this equation. I have the logic of observation. But, as my message development professor always says, “where's the magic?” I need to take risks that actually make ME feel uncomfortable. I need to step out of my comfortable boundaries and take a look at my work and realize how boring it really is.

I don't expect to shake the design world. There are people creating innovative work every day. I just want to be one of them.

Delicious

There are very few things that I love more than a good book. The problem is, you never know what is inside until you're done. This is why good book cover design is so integral to our appreciation of what is to come.

When strolling through the isles of Borders with my good friend, we often play a game to test how well we know each other. We guess which books the other one would read based only on the cover.

My friend, Megan, loves historical fiction. I can always guess the covers she loves the best because they are usually nothing that I would ever choose. Her books have the scrawly gold leaf script with some portrait of a woman from a previous century. You can recognize them right away, and when I see it, I know I am not interested.


Peeking between these dramatic, ornate covers lie the book covers that call to me. I love the simplicity of a good Paul Rand cover. I like the flatness. It is so easy to take this in. I don't feel like it is some sort of fine art piece that takes over the concept of the book. To me, the cover of The Other Boelyn Girl is suffocating, but with the cut out shapes and straight lines, I can breathe.

Here are some other book covers that inspire me with their simplicity.

a design by Chip Kidd

more beauty by Paul Rand

and even more Rand

I just can't stop

To appreciate some of the beautiful covers created by other graphic designers, here is one by Lorraine Wild, followed by John Maeda:

Although the front cover of the book is typically the most highly illustrated, we cannot forget the spine. The spine is the first thing you see on the shelves of highly packed book stores (the best kind). It must be quickly noticed and read, or that book is doomed to lay dusty on the shelf until it eventually makes it to the bookstore clearance sale. Here is a book cover that capitalizes on the importance of the spine:

I also found a series of bracelets made out of the book spine. While I like the concept, and the fact that these are made out of recycled material, there is no way you would catch me wearing one of these:

All of these books are created individually, but looking at books in a series, here is one grouping that I believe is very beautifully done:

The colors are similar, but not the same. The illustrations are similar, but not the same. The best part is that they would look beautiful together sitting on a book shelf, no matter how they are shelved.

The book grouping on which I wish to operate is the _ for Dummies series. It is a concept that everyone knows and understands. The idea is simple, but the cover is horrible:
I don't really care which books I choose within the series, but I think that the computer languages would be fun. The coding has such a graphic quality, and I think I could exploit that. I do, somehow, want to keep the dummy dude, but I want to remove so much text. The book reads like packaging for Windows software. They list so many features that the potential buyer gets intimidated and confused and decides to go for something prettier.

This will be an interesting challenge, and I am looking forward to finding a more harmonious solution to such a recognizably ugly book cover.

"Cool is conservative fear dressed in black."

I cannot take credit for this title. Bruce Mau, a man who has very strong ideas about what design is NOT, wrote these words. He believes that design is not cool, and I have to agree.

Cool is trendy, and it passes with the times. What my parents thought was cool is ver not cool at this day in age. I do not accept cool, partially because cool does not accept me, but partially because it is not worth very much.

Every Abercrombie storefront sells cool. It costs about $75, and that is just for the jeans! Cool won't pay the bills forever, cool does not mean intelligent, and cool is based on fear.

While I was looking for inspirational posters to spark something in my mind, I found a hell of a lot of cool. Every movie poster and clothing store had something to say about cool and why their product is cool. The sleek lines and toned muscles told us that if we are not a part of this, we are missing out - and probably will never get laid.

What I find much more fascinating is the ugly.

Ugly is something that can be so beautiful and fascinating if we let it take hold of our imagination. This poster, designed for the band Taxi Taxi, uses the ugly to grab our attention in a seductive way. Although the gradient in the back is pretty disappointing, the bloody bandaids have such a tactile quality, even when viewed electronically, that we can't look away.

Ugly comes in many shapes and sizes. Ugly also comes in many different shades of beautiful. There is culturally accepted ugly, such as the Windows Vista interface. There is also a brand of ugly that is entirely culturally unacceptable. An ugly woman will never be seen in a Victoria's Secret ad. That is just unacceptable - culturally, that is. Intellectually, I would find it very captivating.

Cool does not, however, rule out the ugly. Just by googling cool and ugly together, I find many pop culture icons. The first think that pops up is "The Family Guy" showing off his bulging belly. Does any one else find a double standard here?

The beautiful can also be turned to ugly with a slight shift. This woman, who is probably very beautiful, could be a model in a Victoria's Secret ad. It would usually be very culturally acceptable to see this woman naked, or in various forms of naked, across ads and in men's magazines.

The shift, however, lies in the composition. Her vulnerable position, and her "severed" feet, show the viewer a different picture.

Even without reading the words at the bottom, which I can't do because they aren't in English, you know that something very ugly is at the center of this subject matter.

My point is that beauty very often lies in the ugly, and vise-versa. Cool doesn't have much of anything to do with it. Cool, as Bruce Mau puts it so elegantly, is a display of fear, especially a fear of creativity.

what am i?

What is graphic design?

This is a question that every design teacher has asked me since I began studying it as a subject. The dictionary program on my dashboard says some sterile, uninspiring bit about combining text and pictures in various fields of communication. I sure as hell hope that there is more to my chosen area of study than this.

I hope, and yet I know. Graphic design brings sanity and beauty to every bit of information that every crosses our plane of vision - if the editor would only let it. Graphic design is the answer to the question, “how do I make sense of all of this?” By organizing and deciding what is important visually, a graphic designer can actually control the way that content is read, understood and appreciated.

Speaking of appreciation, I do also understand that graphic design is one of the least appreciated aspects of communication material. When there isn't enough room in the budget or on the page, design is the first thing to go (at least for most newspapers, magazines, newsletters . . . I could go on). I also understand that the design is one of the most important aspects of a page. When a reader is flipping through a magazine, whether she knows it or not, the design of the page has a lot more weight in the decision of whether or not to read it than the actual content. The appreciation of design is something that the average person does automatically.


What is Typography?

I can't say that I have ever been asked this question before by a professor, but whenever I mention this word to a non-designer, he or she automatically asks this very familiar question. In short, it is the art of arranging, or setting, type.

In long, it is a grueling process of detail-oriented changes and a lifelong appreciation of the subtle nuances and radical changes that typographers have created to the characters that we so often take for granted. It is understanding that the upper-case Q of any typeface is probably the most defining characteristic of the entire alphabet. It is understanding the personality of helvetica as if she were the girl next door. Typography is the arranging of written material with the intent of readability or abstraction, expression or mutability.


What are my responsibilities as a designer?

As a designer, I feel responsible for making the content I produce visually interesting, understandable and aesthetically pleasing, but only when necessary. I am responsible for challenging the average viewer on their definition of beauty and working hard to create my own.

That being said, I am also responsible for my own work. I will never put my name on something that is not my own, and I will never tolerate this from others. A designer’s responsibility is to create new things and not to recycle old ones under a new name.


What can make my classes more valuable to me?

The first answer to this question is, well, me. I have always been the one to decide what I want out of a class and how I can get it. It always helps to have a teacher that challenges me and my boundaries. I need a lot of guidance at this stage in my learning, but I also sometimes need a person to shove me into the water and say, “swim for yourself!”