Guacamole, Rubberbands and Cartoons.

The first video that I watched was from Luis Fitch. Firstly, this was awesome because he dressed as a traditional masked wrestler and made guacamole. Not too sure how that relates to design, however, I’ve now got a great recipe for guacamole. He does speak on design at the end of the video and talks about how design can be used to cross cultural borders. I think his thoughts about impacting culture through design, although brief, are extremely valid. Spoken and written language can sometimes hinder communication and even perpetuate barriers that exist between us culturally. However, using imagery that transcends language that anyone can engage with, designers can truly make an impact on we as humans see each other.

The second video from Ami Kealoha was more so a commentary on noticing the design in the little things, like rubber-bands, and being able to tune out all the noise around us to focus in the things that are important. Before I watched this video, I had never really given much thought to the rubber-band all the different types that exist. What I took away from her video is even the simplest things had to have some type of design process behind it and sometimes we need to take a moment to appreciate that. There are nuances to the things that we use and it is in those nuances that we find beauty.

The last video I watched was from Pete Docter, who happens to be an animator with Pixar. His states that, “Design is the purposeful arrangement of elements to produce a reaction in the viewer.” He interprets this as a way to tell a story. To him, the story is that your design is trying to convey is the most important part. Thinking about our last assignment, the infographic, even though we may not have been telling a “narrative” we were still conveying some sort of story. This story relied heavily on our imagery. The most successful ones had the best imagery for the message that it was conveying. They told their story well.

All people in the videos, although, they had very different perspectives on what was important to design, had ideas that seemed to correlate. If we as budding designers are able to keep some of these things in mind then we can produce work that people truly connect with and take something away from that work as well.