Design Vocabulary + Principles

design is a indication of a confident society

charles and ray eames, furniture graphic, product desiners

designed a american culutre expo for moscow

design is no longer a veneer,

desing aritculates a culture's question,

the european question

is everyone a little bit happy,

design and explanation facutally and poetic,

informational inspirational
denotation connotation

denotation is facts
connotations is suggestion

best design is understandable
meaningful
poetic

design is desire disguised as function

peer productions, people making things on their own

adobe illustrator

simillar tools to photshop,

use place to import a image

pen tool is 3rd from the top of the left

illusatrtor use a vector so no distortion with resizing,

use delete anchor point or add anchor point to change trace.

convert acnhor point to smooth edges, smooth gemoetry etc.

objective path simplify and efect stylize round corners smooth tracing and gemotry.

David Carson Paper

David Carson is often considered to be the most influential Graphic Designer of the 90’s. Utilizing unorthodox type settings and layouts, he crafted a distinct style that was often imitated and defined the grunge movement of the 90’s. His work with experimental type faces, photography, and lay outs, has not only influenced graphic designers of his era, but shifted the way graphic design is done today.

David Carson was born on September 8^th, 1955 in Corpus Christi Texas. In 1980 he attended San Diego State University and graduated with honors and distinction. Being a former professional surfer he was ranked 9^th during his days at college, his surfing background would influence his work with surfing lifestyle magazine. In 1990 David Carson began working with the surfing magazine known as Beach Culture. David Carson work with the magazine “shocked the design community” his use of unorthodox typefaces and odd layouts drew attention from critics who deemed his work innovative despite the criticism of him. In one issue, David Carson made the page numbers font larger then the headline, and moved them out of order. Eventually funding for Beach Culture dried up, resulting in the end of the magazine. After working with several other magazine, David Carson launched the magazine “Ray Gun” and music and lifestyle magazine. His work through this publication made Carson name well known as well as gaining attention for his unique work in graphic design. In 1995 David Carson founded his own studio in New York, called David Carson Design. From 1995 to 1998 He began to do design work for major corporate clients including Pepsi Cola, Nike, Microsoft, Budweiser, and many other major corporate clients. In 2000 he opened another private design studio in South Carolina. In 2004 Carson became the creative director for the Gibbes Museum of Art. He has written several books, including the famous “End of print” which is the best selling graphic design book of all time, selling over 200,000 copies. He most recent book, “Trek” chronicles his art and his life.

David Carson’s work can be described as highly unique and unorthodox by typical design standards. His work features, spread-out, inverted, and mixed font type. Often accompanying overlapping pictures. He has been known to mix capital and lowercase letters within words, blur letters, and place certain letters inside of boxes within the word. While working for Beach Culture, “Carson used Dingbat as the font for what he considered a dull interview with Bryan Ferry.” Carson explains: “Overall people are reading less, I’m just visually enticing them to read.”

David Carson approach to graphic design has drastically changed and influenced future graphic designers and the subsequent style of graphics design during the 90’s

Contrast of two 3rd drafts

2nd draft

3rd part of photoshop project

3rd draft of photoshop project

Reaction to FA27 prof Bonanni lecture

I found professor Bonanni’s lecture on smart objects and smart space to be rather informative and interesting. Examining many of the aspects he presented on ubiquitous computing, I have formulated several reactions.

The category of Tangible Interfaces presented by Professor Bonanni seemed to me as the most accessible form of ubiquitous computing for the general public, as well as a potential rich environment for future business ventures. Tangible interfaces, such as popular products like the iphone, have already been integrated to mainstream consumers, and has met with a large amount of success. The applications for devices such as the I/O brush, G-Speak, and tangible interfaces on, walls, desks, etc would allow a greater degree of flexibility and versatility among the computing uses. A general rule of all software programming is that the more versatile or flexible a program is raises the degree of speed and efficiency at which a user can operate it. Especially in terms of workspaces, for designers, programmers, and artitis could really benefit from tangible interfaces.

I found the ambient display aspect in some respects to be rather childish in its design. The obvious answer is that ambient displays presents a excellent means to alerting and updating information. One could argue that when an Alarm clock goes off, it ambiently displays the time for you to wake up with a beeping noise. The question is it that at what point do you need information displayed to you, how, and through what device. I find that communicating through a plastic rabbit ear design to send messages by pressing certain ears down to be not only primitive in design, but rather frustrating. Especially when it so easy to simply pick up a phone an call. In my opinion the ultimate ambient display would be a wearable type watch, that updates to the internet through WiFi, The user could select a host of information to be displayed on the watch. The alerts could be through either flashing lights or vibration.

My next reaction to the presented material, is at what point does accessible become excessive. It seems to me that devices such as the one pictured in the futuristic kitchen, a device that measure the temperature of the food item you’re cooking as well as relaying other information, is highly useful. However I found some of the item presented to ridiculous. The ideas of augmented reality seems to be too much. I don’t think that is necessary to pretend to play PacMan in the real world, by wearing a gigantic computer on your head. As well as the application of placing message in tiny stickers seems to me a rather waste of time and money, when similar messages can be relayed using more direct methods of communication. Eventually the question must be asked, at what point does carrying some type of device become cumbersome. The fact of the matter is the average person might not want to wear sunglasses, that display special messages, or for that matter shell out the funds to cover the cost of such an item.

The other issue of this matter is security. These smart objects are all essentially the same thing, tiny computers, that share the same weakness as regular computers. Which means these devices are prone to malfunction, require updates, will depreciate in their capabilities as well as monetary value as the years pass, and are succesepatble to computer virus. With the wealth of personal information that will pass between such smart objects the security risks are phenomenal.

One thing that is clear to me after the presentation is that the potential for design aspects of these smart objects is enormous. The public will want sleek stylish devices that fit and meet their needs. Designers will not only be needed for outward appearances but internal architecture and choices about functionality of these smart objects.

All and all I found Professor Bonanni lecture to informative and enjoyable and look forward to possibly hearing another lecture from him in time to come.