jamin.org

Apparently Adaptive Path is into the Jung Typology test. I was urged to take it, and according to the test, I’m an ENFP: Extraverted (56%), intuitive (50%), feeling (25%), and perceiving (22%). The percentages are strength of preferences.

Qualitative analysis of your type formula

You are:

• moderately expressed extravert
• moderately expressed intuitive personality
• moderately expressed feeling personality
• slightly expressed perceiving personality

ENFP type description by D.Keirsey
ENFP type description by J. Butt and M.M. Heiss
ENFP Career Choices

For our final grad type class, we had to print our final project, a poster for a fictitious event at the MoMA, and present our identity projects.

We spent most of the second half of the semester working on the identity project, of which the main deliverable was business cards. However, we also needed to create a system that worked for letterhead, envelopes, and mailing labels.

We started with a gesture paintings. I created about 50 and then combined some to form my starting composition.

We took these paintings and then had to translate them into type. I used Meta and only the five letters in my first name to produce the following spread for my business cards.

For the poster, I went through many iterations and lots of feedback before arriving at my final design. Kristin Hughes applauded my progress, and said I may have “hit the nail on the head.” Though we both acknowledged some things that still need to be resolved, but I came a long way from my original concept.

In the end, I am glad I took grad type instead of the Flash class. I learned a heck of a lot more and now have a good foundation in typography, which I believe extends to communication design in general to a degree.

On the up side, my latter projects have benefited from my new typographic skills. On the down side, I spend more time tweaking typography and layout on projects that I would have previously ignored, which means less sleep for Jamin, but better results overall.

The final crit was Thursday, December 7.

As I mentioned before, my typography class has been a challenge for me. Next week all of the projects from the first half of the course are due, as we will be switching instructors from Karen Moyer to Kristin Hughes.

Our last project is designing a calendar. For whatever reason, I got a billion ideas for calendars. Unfortunately, there is not enough time for me to explore more than one, so I have been experimenting with these:

The black seemed a bit heavy, so I’ve been experimenting with color. Burnt orange was recommended. But I’m not sure this iteration is yet what I want.

For six weeks I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve been studying typography. On occasion, I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve produced something halfway to halfway decent as a result of some happy accident or a course of placement and treatment that did not necessarily follow from any typographic prowess.

In the words of own of my more honest classmates, ?¢‚Ǩ?ìyour type sucks.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

Indeed, it does.

Of all my classes, type is currently the most frustrating, which makes sense as it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s the greatest challenge I face, given that my actual design skills are weak. Incidentally, it is also the class that I spend the least amount of time, perhaps because it highlights my weakness.

I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m sharing this because I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m trying to turn this around. I recognize that I need to spend as much time with type as I do with everything else, perhaps even lose some sleep for typography, or else I will not improve and the whole course will be in vain.

By sharing my lackluster effort, I hope to hold myself accountable to more effort. Picking up some design skills was, after all, one of the motivating factors in applying to design school.

Toward improvement, I read through Typography: Macro- and Microaesthetics by Willi Kunz over the weekend to learn more about the basics of typography and then see examples of layouts and using grids. This book was really good for both.

Tonight I spent a couple hours on my type assignment and tried to employ some of the lessons learned from Kunz. The result was still much more bland than I had hoped. Though I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m still hopeful.

However, I think I need to view more examples and spend more time in front of the screen mucking about.

I will leave you with an exchange, completely out of context, from our last type class.

A: Bell Centennial is a phone book font.
B: Your mom?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s a phone book font.

Oh the kids and their design humor!

I’ve mostly been talking about my Design Seminar class with Dick Buchanan and my Interaction and Visual Interface Design with John Zimmerman because those classes involve more discussion of ideas, which are easier to write about.

My other two classes, Design Studio with Dan Boyarski and Graduate Type with Karen Moyer (and later Kristin Hughes), are studio classes where the focus is on producing work for critique.

Data as Self-Portrait

In Dan’s class we’re tracking data about ourselves over a seven-day period. We are going to explore visualizing this data as a form of self-portrait.

I collected data about my daily communications: email (sent, received, and spam for three different accounts), IM (sent, received), phone calls (outgoing, incoming), text messages (sent, received), and hours per day in front of a computer.

Type as Self-Portrait

On a similar vein, in grad type we were given a construct, “I used to _________, but now I don’t”to create a typographic self-portrait using our constructions in a 10×10 space.

These are in the order that I created them. Despite the text being all over the place, I felt the design was too conservative to represent who I really am. I moved to a more organic shape that plays with line breaks in a poetic way and has a sense of movement. The last one is a greater attempt to experiment.

My classmates seemed to like the first the best, with noted problems. I kind of like the middle for its poetics. But some said they liked the last. Design is subjective.

Next week we will explore using the same content for an accordian-type book. But I plan to continue working on these.

If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it.

As an interaction design student, I have four courses that I was automatically signed up for, all of which are required.

One of the courses, Design Computing, is primarily as Flash course. As I have designed and developed with Flash for many years, I got this course waived. I then signed up for Graduate Typography.

However, while I was working on getting the Flash course waived, I learned more about the curriculum. The first several weeks would likely be mind numbing. But the rest of the course involves working with video and creating games. That sounds fun and easy!

So I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m having a dilemma about which to drop, Design Computing or Graduate Typography. If I take the computing class, I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll be with my peers and I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll be doing something fun and easy. Also, there?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s been talk about me possibly teaching the course next year. So it would be an opportunity to observe the current instructor.

If I take grad type, I will be learning something new and further develop my design skills. And I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m assuming this would be the more challenging of the two. I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m always up for a challenge.

Since I can’t decide, I’m keeping all five on my schedule for the first week, unless clarity comes to me sooner.

As I was typing this an email came in asking if anyone would be interested in be a TA for Online Information Design. It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s basic web stuff. Yes, I would be interested. Will I have the time?

Decisions?¢‚Ǩ¬¶

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.