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This week was not as intense as the past couple weeks, which was a nice change. Part of that had to do with us not starting to actually create our change of address forms until Thursday.

Despite only having one day to turn it around, everyone turned in quality work. It was impressive to see all the variations. They all looked professional.

Like I said, I pretty much kept to my thumbnail sketch (which Bob collected—ugh!). I went with a simplified approach that separated the form process into four steps. I eliminated nearly all the directions and instead aimed to make everything clear through the form itself and instructive headers.

My Form

Bob didn’t say much about mine during the critique. It seems that critiques (or crits) are a crapshoot when it comes whether your piece receives much evaluation. Some of us talked about this after class. We mused about the time and energy that goes into a project with the potential that it won’t really be reviewed, and how that can be a bit of a letdown.

Hard to believe there are only two more weeks to go. Next week we explore photography. And the last week is illustration, I believe.

Today Bob critiqued our thumbnail sketches. Mine were pretty bad in retrospect. Bad in the sense that they didn’t look like much time or thought went into them, which is true for the time part. However, as it turns out, I followed my thumbnail sketch for my final production.

Mine were full scale: 10.5 x 6.125. I wanted to see the space I was working with, and get a sense of the organization of the content in that space. I only added a few design details. And I used a pen.

So it wasn’t a big surprise to me that Bob did not spend much time critiquing my thumbnails.

I believe in the idea of sketching out ideas. I was always an advocate for wireframes for web design if time and budget allowed. But I don’t know that there has to be a specific format or look for thumbnail sketches to be useful.

For this project, I felt confident moving forward with the sketches I created. What I’m getting at is I think that part of the process of creating a design is whatever works for you. Thumbnail sketches and wireframes can be very useful, and I believe that complex designs should be sketched and explored before taking them to the computer. But I’m not sure there’s a rule to follow.

Like I said, my sketches helped me and provided direction for my final product. So in effect, they did the job, despite looking like I did not put a lot of time into them.

Yesterday my group and I wandered about CMU campus looking for people to fill out the US Postal Service’s mail forwarding change of address form so we could see what types of problems people have. The idea was to use the information we gathered to inform the redesign of the form that each of us will be completing by Friday.

We ended up testing five people. While that may seem like a small number, it’s amazing what you can determine from even the smallest amount of user testing.

Today in class, the three groups compared findings. The two major issues that everyone encountered were:

• No one read or even knew there were directions, since they’re not attached to the form
• Most people did not know how to mail the form when they were done.

People did not have much trouble with the form itself, as it’s pretty simple. But the design could definitely be improved to make it friendlier, at the least.

The forms we are creating will be 10.5 inches x 6.125 inches (the current form is 7 inches x 5.5 inches). So we’ll have room to bring in any needed directions as part of the form.

For tomorrow we are to create thumbnail sketches of proposed designs. I’ve already done mine, one as a vertical layout, and the other horizontal. They include numbered sections to help people easily figure out what they need to fill out and where to go next. At least, that is the intention.

Candle Holders

So here is a shot of the candle holders I made during week two of the design fundamentals course.

I don’t have any tea lights at the moment, so I couldn’t light them up.

Again, these are made out of paper and were required to fold flat so that they could fit in an envelope. They also needed to be easy to assemble.

Mine pop open, so they assemble in about five seconds. You can also flip them upside down to get a different shape.

This week we’re exploring information design with Bob Swinehart. Today we talked broadly about information design, and defined it as designing to help people understand information. And while that makes sense, it also has the feel of defining interaction design as “designing for interaction.” Though I do like the simplicity of both.

Our project for this week is to redesign the U.S. Post Service mail-in change of address form. This is a project that Bob has actually already undertaken. Our effort is purely educational.

We were put in groups of four or five. And tomorrow each group will find subjects on the street for user testing of the current form so that we can discover common flaws. Sounds like fun, doesn’t 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.

I had a talk with Stacie today about how I believe my experience is keeping me from taking risks. I have realized over the past few weeks that even when I do take a chance, I often do not submit that for critique. And I find that troubling, since school is exactly the place to experiment.

I have always let the designers do the designing. I know some amazing designers that can whip shit up that will amaze you in little time. In the past I could not compete, so I learned to err on the side of simplicity when it came to design.

Stacie supported my desire to take more risks and suggested some classes I might take to advance my design skills. I will have to follow up with her on that, because at the moment, I can’t remember what it was, but it did have something to do with typography.

She also said that at the end of the two years, I will be able to design. Not having the skills for so long, it’s still hard for me to grasp that.

It’s nearly midnight, and I just got back from the design studio. I left the studio at 4:30 to go to soccer practice. When I got back at 9 p.m., three of the people I left there had not left. One person is still there now.

Ah, school.

The reason we were all there was to work on our communication design projects. We have a draft due 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.