What have I learned that impacts the way I approach the design of visual communication content? Holy manoly. The following is an unordered list written in html. It contains the things I’ve learned.
- Books are better than movies.
- You can say, “I love you,” in Helvetica. And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it’s really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work.
- I am who I say I am.
- It’s perfectly ok to plagiarize. Except that it’s not.
- Thought is finite. Except that it’s not.
- In order to create, I must be willing to destroy. Mistakes are valuable and worthwhile because they lead to better design.
- Art has a pacifying function in society. It allows people to gather about something and have something in common.
- When designing for an idea, it is important to figure out the appropriate aesthetic for what that idea is trying to convey.
- If you can’t reminisce about “School House Rock,” you’re not American.
- Casting is terribly important when making a serious film.
- Camera angle, lighting, and setting your shots are just as important in animation as they are in real life.
- Subtle things like texture and alignment can make all the difference in the world.
- My heart speaks to my brain, which speaks to my hands, which create. It’s important to feel when I design.
- Administrative debris is a design of the past. It is entirely unnecessary in today’s world of such advanced technology.
- Clutter and overload are a failure of design.
Having an understanding of visual aesthetics is important when the artifacts being created are interactive, as crappy interactive design would seem to indicate. Grouping, continuity, closure, similarity, figure/ground relationship, and I’m sure I missed some, are important in interactive design as they are in static design. Actually, with so much of our interactive design being designed for flat spaces, like screens, the difference between to two currently is not all that different. Sure, it’s *becoming* different, but as it stands, interactive design physically looks an awful lot like non-interactive design. And even when we do move entirely from flat images to 3D, it will be equally important to keep these concepts in mind. I know when we’re working with holographic interfaces, we’ll still want all our buttons grouped in an understandable pattern, and we’ll still want to be able to get the feel of the design without confusion.
About my career, I don’t know. I’d really like to go into app design I think. By the end of next semester, I’m sure I’ll be able to make a living in that field. Whether or not I’ll want to stay there is irrelevant. I mean, look at Sang: he’s got a degree in microbiology for crying out loud.
And if I didn’t learn anything else all year, I know what “shibboleth” means, and that might be useful one day. You know, like if I make it on Jeopardy! or something.