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It took me a while, but I’ve accepted that I am now a designer because my thinking about what it means to be a designer has changed.

And while I can envision and practice design from a certain standpoint, I’m still very much lacking in the communication design arena. This is proving to be quite frustrating, as regardless of my design thinking, the execution of visual deliverables do not turn out the way I hope.

My lack of strong visual deliverables was confirmed last week when I received feedback from professors that indicated as much.

My frustration turned to a slight panic and frenzy to figure out how to improve my visual design skills. I have sought out some people to help me (that’s the beauty of being in a design school: there are lots of designers about), which has allayed my panic slightly. I was reminded that I can’t expect to become an awesome designer in a matter of weeks.

I tried to relate learning design skills to my learning of writing and poetry. Practice and experience and time for reflection are required. (I wrote crap poetry for years, and possibly still do.)

When I approached one fellow grad student to ask for help, I mentioned something about not really understanding how to work with white space, and she gasped, as if to indicate the situation was much worse than she expected. Fortunately, she agreed to look at my work.

I also put down Saffer’s Designing for Interaction and started reading The Elements of Graphic Design by Alex White. This is a book from Dan Boyarski’s reading list. It focuses on space, unity, page architecture, and type.

While probably a bit basic for some, it’s perfect for me, as the text is simple, and is paired with lots of examples. It also contains lots of quotes, which appeals to my literary sense.

“I fill up a place, which may be better…
when I have made it empty.”
?¢‚Ǩ‚ÄùWilliam Shakespeare, As You Like It

While I was quite happy with my poster yesterday, today is just seemed okay. I had a suspicion that it was too safe. It worked well, but I felt like I didn’t really push myself.

Type Poster

Stacie essentially confirmed my suspicion when I asked her. She also commented that I seem fairly familiar with type, and that I need to get myself to a place that I’ve never been before.

I thought about that the rest of the day. Perhaps I’m not acknowledging that through writing, editing, and web design, I’ve been working with type for some time. In retrospect, I kind of feel like I did a bunch of things I’ve seen done before. And I am now viewing the arrows as a copout or a gimmick.

That said, I’m probably not going to hang the poster on my wall, unless I want to remind myself to go beyond mediocrity.

In case you think I’m beating myself up, I’m not. It’s actually a bit inspiring to realize there’s a place I can go that I’ve never been. And it’s exciting that I have no fucking clue how to get there.

I keep imagining an open field at the edge of a forest. Tall grass.

Beers with Dan

Dan caught some of us after class and asked if we wanted to grab a beer later.

Um, yeah.

We spread the word and met up at some new place in Point Breeze that I had never heard of called Point Brugge. It’s a nice place with limited outdoor seating and Leffe Blonde, Oberon Ale, Stella Artois, and Chimay Triple on tap. The also have quite a few Belgian bottles.

Beers with the head of the school of design: Graduate school is so way cooler than undergraduate.

It’s amazing how each week we go from nothing to a full-blown production. On Monday it seems implausible that we will actually accomplish the task given to us.

This week I went from arranging magazine cutouts on an 8×11 piece of paper, to arranging an 11-page document on a 30×72 poster. Last week I could not believe I completed my candle holder project, and this week I’m equally in disbelief.

Despite dreaming last night about moving content around the page, it has been a very positive journey. Even when I fail, or when someone else does, there is something to learn. And I’m learning a lot.

Today we analyzed the mockups we created yesterday. I got some great feedback on how to improve my piece. And as I said, I learned a lot from what others did.

I worked on my final piece most of the afternoon, and looked to my peers in the studio with me for feedback on my iterations. Their input was invaluable in making my piece better. I do not think it would have turned out as well if I was doing it on my own.

(I’m using the word “feedback” a lot. The group interaction is something that you can only get by being immersed in the course. Sorry online learners!)

Some requirements for the poster included using only the Meta font family, it had to be all type, and it had to be black and white, or percentages of black (i.e., grays were okay).

Ta Da!

I am really happy with my poster, considering my struggles and relative cluelessness. I’m not sure it takes a lot of risks, but it seems to mostly work. We’ll see what Stacie thinks tomorrow.

Our project for the week is to use supplied text in the context of a large poster (30″x72″), a book, or a website. Because I have lots of web experience, I was not allowed to choose the website, so I chose the poster.

The supplied text is about 10 pages, so putting all that content on a poster will definitely be a challenge. But I’m excited to again do something that I’m not used to.

Also, I will have to print out the poster for the final presentation on Friday. And I’m curious how that will turn out.

Tonight’s homework assignment was to create thumbnail sketches of the content for our chosen medium. I found the exercise very similar in concept to wireframing or storyboarding. Sketching on a small-scale version allows for experimentation and exploration before going to the computer. It’s rapid and allows you to take chances that you might not take when working with software.

This week of my design fundamentals course at CMU Stacie Rohrbach is introducing us to communication design. Stacie gave us an overview of grids, fonts, and legibility versus readability.

A point I found interesting was that for three of the four types of grids (manuscript, column, and modular), Stacie said you can set up the grids and then see how the content fits into them. And for the fourth…the hierarchical grid, which is often used for web—the hierarchy of content will drive the grid. I’m probably not doing justice with my explanation, but I found myself wondering if the former case impairs print designers when they attempt to design for the web because they’re not used to the latter case.

Stacie mentioned numerous books on type and grid systems. One book, Thinking with Type, I read last year. She also noted Neve Typography by Jan Tschichold and Formation and Transformation by Willi Kunz.

Today’s Exercise

We were asked to use a transparent grid to align content that we cut out from magazines and newspapers so that we could experiment with different layouts. Although we were told to choose a medium for our design (e.g., book, web page, poster), I wasn’t very clear in what I hoped to accomplish, which made for a lot of spinning wheels and getting nowhere.

Faced with the embarrassment of not having anything to show, I quickly put together a poster (it sucked). Lucky for me, it was actually identified as a poster by my classmates when we examined all the results.

Photoshop

This week’s software boot camp focuses on Photoshop, which I have been using for about nine years. Though I have mostly been using it to cut up web design mockups for the past couple years.

We manipulated photos today, which was something I thought I didn’t know how to do. Turns out I do. I just haven’t practiced that much.

For both classes, we have homework.