Principals of Design: Grouping

Day 18/150

Grouping

Elements in a layout interact with the borders to create meaning and the position of elements in relation to each other has an effect, the relative positions of multiple objects have associations. In as sense, when  a third element is introduced into a design consisting of two elements, the third element is forced to take sides.

Study of Grouping

Seven dots arranged in a space.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

Principals of Design: Placement

Day 17/150

Placement

The fist graphic design consideration of visual communication is placement. A component's placement in relation to the boundaries of the layout begins to communicate something to the audience. An element placed in the center of a layout communicates something different than an element placed so that the distance between the object and the borders are different on every side. Stability, tranquility, dominance, order: these are ideas associated with an equal spacing. Placing an element off-center has the effect of conveying movement, tension and uncertainty. Unequal placement usually reduces emphasis, while equal placement usually increases emphasis.

vs.

vs.

It's easy to create a guide over your layout to help you evaluate the placement of elements in a layout. Draw an X from corners of the layout, and a + through the midpoints of the sides. They should intersect at the center of the layout. The areas outside the lines, represented as dark areas in the image below, show the areas within which elements may be placed and have unequal placement.

Spacing is a concept related to placement. All spaces within a layout are important. The spacing between elements with the layout can be compared to the spacing between other elements, and any elements and the boundaries of the layout. It all and affects the communication. Equal spacing usually reduces emphasis, while unequal spacing usually increases emphasis.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

Principals of Design: Introduction

Day 16/150

Graphic design is primarily concerned with making decisions about elements within a layout, a predefined visual space within which information is presented. Typically the primary components, the information, has been determined before the graphic designer begins to work. Working within those constraints, the graphic designer utilizes a basic visual grammar to relate, enhance, organize and prioritize a message. A graphic designer's art is the functional equivalent of body language, and is similarly important to successful communication.

The principals of design are an accounting of the basic terms and definitions of the visual grammar of a graphic designer. Placement, grouping, division, color, typography, harmony, balance, contrast: these are some of the essential considerations of a graphic designer. Design by itself means "on purpose", the result of decision. Graphic design is the purposeful consideration and deliberate application of the principals of design to information in a layout.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

First Things First Manifesto

Day 15/150

photo by "Stuck in Customs"

Happily reading my new library book: Graphic Design, Referenced: A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design.

I came across the First Things First Manifesto, and then the First Things First Manifesto 2000 revision. I find Times Square--hence the photo above--exemplifies "a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact." If you've ever been there you'll be overwhelmed by the commerial advertising, but you don't have to go further than your local downtown, or any mall, to have a similar experience. You almost get it walking out of house. Looking around my own house I sometimes get that feeling indoors too!

Look no further than Facebook and see how much all of our lives center on talking about or interacting with brands? Graphic designers and the marketing industry as a whole have done their jobs well and now it's a challenge to go through any conversation with anybody about anything without mentioning a brand. Considering that the original manifesto was written in 1964, it's probably not surprising that with designers continuing to foster hyper consumerism for nearly 50 years of knowing better that it is impossible to look upon any man-made landscape that has gone unbranded or underutilized for it's marketing potential.


photo by ATIS547


photo by agross96

We literally can not look in any direction, or converse on any topic of cultural or practical significance, or even so much as contemplate our lives for long without selling, or being sold, something. I haven't been able to get through this blog post (see Facebook mention and book advertisement above.) We do it without thinking, and almost without notice, don't we?

If the First Things First Manifesto 2000 was relevant at the time, then it's just in this past ten years that the vision of the original authors has truly come to fruition, that we citizen-consumers have changed how we think, feel, respond and interact. That change has happened, as it was happening in 2000, and was bound to happen in 1964.

Given that the change has happened, what do we --we graphic designers-- do now? What is our responsibility now? If we do as the signatories before us have done and dedicate ourselves to more worthy pursuits, if we design on behalf of more worthy causes, do we not just further contribute to this cacophony of visual communication and accompanying mental shift? But then should we refuse to design, refuse to fill up all the blank spaces in our world with one message or another, will there ever be the relief of a blank wall, or a simple, unbranded object?

Neither course will give remedy, I'm afraid. In fact, there may be no remedy within our means. I wonder, though, if we may yet bear some responsibility to engage in counter-advertising? I wonder if we might not use our talents to rebel, to use what we know to undo some of the damage. Can we counter the messages we've instilled in the public? Can we say, "you do not need to call now," or "you do not deserve a break today"? Shouldn't we feel obliged to take our knowledge and understanding and deprogram ourselves and the public, even just a little?

How shall we write the new First Things First manifesto? Maybe it will be called the Now That We're Here manifesto instead.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

Layout: Graphic Design Referenced

Day 14/150

"Throughout the myriad disciplines in graphic design and it's numerous manifestations, one fundamental remains constant: layout. No matter what the project is--big or small, online or printed, single- or multi-page, flat or three-dimensional, square or round--images and/or text must be placed and organized consciously. Layout can be objectively described as the physical properties (spacing , sizing positioning) and arrangement of the design elements within a determined area and, ultimately, as the finished design. This leads to the subjective assessment of how effectively those properties are arranged within that area--and to heated discussions among designers. While a layout can be executed in infinite ways, a few principles must be taken into consideration so informed decisions can be made on how to exploit it."

Graphic Design, Referenced: A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design, p. 23

The web is a particularly peculiar canvas, and this quote gets to the heart of why it is especially challenging. Working on a layout relies on working "within a determined area", but the area available to a web designer is determined according to different dimensions than other kinds of graphic design. For a print piece I might understand that I'm working on a sheet of paper with a fixed size of, for example 8.5" x 11". A web designer's page varies from viewer to viewer, and even moment to moment as a viewer can resize the browser window at any time. I guess a web designer just needs to focus on how elements are arranged in relation to the other elements, within contexts of classes of potential uses, be it mobile phone, netbook and tablet, or full sized widescreen display.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot. 

Drupal Rules

Day 13/150

Spent productive moments today sifting through the relatively impenetrable documentation for the Drupal Rules module. The stuff is seriously bad. Pure bloodymindedness saw me through to a modicum of understanding, to wit, I understand that to automate a task you first create a {rule set} which takes {arguments} and inside it create a {rule} which has {conditions} (but you don't use conditions here) and {actions} (which you do set up here). From the {triggered rules} section you configure the {condition} (your trigger) and {action}, which invokes the {rule set} you set up first.

I'm left frustrated, however, nagged by questions I asked in the Drupal IRC channel, but which were not answered:

Fighting my way through the Rules module documentation and I can't get my head around it, conceptually. Why do I have rules in rule sets if I can only ever address a rule set (i.e., from triggered rules) rather than a rule? Why can't I have a set of rules that deal with managing content and then build triggered rules that invoke rules within that rule set, depending on the condition?

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

Drupal Automation

Day 12/150

WixsonIT has been migrated from the shared hosting plan to the virtual dedicated server over the last few days, and has been updated from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 to boot. I'm learning quite a lot about Drupal 6 in the process. In particular I'm learning that the workflow_ng module I used in Drupal 5 (played around with, is more like) has been turned into a module called Rules, and actions and triggers have been incorporated into the core of the Drupal program. It used to be that a lot of the automation you could achieve in Drupal was done with program plugins called Actions and Workflow.

So far, from what I understand, Rules is extensible, and allows for all kinds of automation not previously attainable. For instance, it integrates with CCK and Organic Groups, I presume to allow you to move stepwise through processes depending on the values of custom fields or membership in a group. I'm really interested to learn how to do those things.

I'm jumping into the deep end here. Today I watched the video on the Rules project site and did the second tutorial in the documentation, but I have yet to really grok what I'm doing.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

RBGa

Day 11/150

Microsoft really is a pain. It's an impediment to progress. Today I learned about using RBGa in CSS3. The "a" in RGBa stands for "Alpha" and it means the degree to which a thing is opaque or transparent. Having translucent color on the web opens up all kinds of design possibilities which have been available to print designers forever.  I'm really frustrated, though, that Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer, doesn't support the RGBa feature of CSS3 -- not even it's most recent version. Come on! I have to use a special (and long) work-around to achieve in IE something I can do in every other browser?

Another reason not to use Internet Explorer, ever.

The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.

FCE and the Panasonic TM300

Day 10/150

I finally got around to installing Final Cut Express 4 Upgrade on my computer so I can use the files being produced by my lovely Panasonic TM300's. It nearly broke my heart to start working through the user manual information about the "Log and Transfer" window that you use to "ingest" the camera's files only to get a "Error: no data" message on the first attempt. Some furious Googling and I arrived at the answer. By carefully following these directions, after completing the update to Final Cut Express 4.0.1, I got the TM300 files to import neatly into my project. Hurray! There's two hours of fretting I won't get back, though.

Topic : Panasonic TM300 log and transfer crash when trying to import/prev MTS files

First, start by trashing your preferences exactly as detailed in this link:
http://fcpbook.com/Misc1.html

Then, some things to try before ingesting again:

• Make sure you have the correct Easy Setup selected (for 1920x1080 media at 29.97fps, use the AVCHD Apple Intermediate Codec 1920x1080i60 preset)
• In the Log and Transfer window, select preferences (from the "gear" button in the upper right). Make sure the audio is set to Plain Stereo
• In that same preference window, click the button to Clear the Cache

 The "150 Days" series is a post-per-day review of design topics to help me brush up on skills and become a better designer and new media producer as part of my career reboot.