good things
We're on the brink of a new year. Life is good:
- Snow. Two feet of it.
- Climbing 5.11s.
- Running outside in the winter.
- Mom's spare ribs recipe.
- Buckeye candies.
- Some new clothes that fit me.
- New fonts on my computer: Neutra and Warnock.
- I can make a text scrolly button now, in Actionscript.
- Plans for a road trip.
- Plans for a finished basement.
- The love of a good man.
- A roof over my head.
- Food on the table.
- A most excellent and healthy family.
- Fabulous friends.
- A job.
- A good book. Or four.
- New music to listen to.
I am thankful.
Labels: design, outside, rock climbing, running, travel, winter
won't and can't learn
The ABC network appears to have launched a new website template for its local news affiliates, and as usual, for TV news sites, I remain un-wowed, because the managements' priorities are too clear and have nothing to do with the site visitors. Here are two examples:
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/http://abclocal.go.com/wls/Once again I'm sent running to news sites produced by newspapers. It's taken a surprisingly long time for some of them to get a handle on an acceptable volume and quality of imagery. But aside from that, it makes complete sense that newspapers were better practiced at dealing with large volumes of, and variations in, content. One of my favorites is still
Savannah Now, because it's clean and fun.
Labels: design, media
In collusion
Design talk is popular these days. It seems a bit of a fad, really. Still, I'm a designer. Have been, for eight years. Maybe longer if you count all the designery habits I already had, before design school and design job. So, food for thought:
Dan Saffer, today on A Brief Message, starts
a lively discussion on design "making" versus design "thinking." I don't know that designers are being "told" to stop making design, though I do admit that a) many people think our work serves no purpose-and that we are annoying, and b) a lot of the "making" work we do is so redundant and wrought with unrealistic deadlines that we ourselves would rather not do it. Whole software industries are being developed to remove some of these steps from our lives, for better or for worse.
But if the world is really starting to listen to what designers have to say, hooray. Designers (of all flavors: industrial, software, furniture, graphic, interactive, etc.) were put on this planet to solve problems, so they really should be the aware ones with ideas.
I then moved a little further down my design feed list to The Design Observer, which today brings
a compelling discussion about how designers should apply their skills and their efforts. This question is posed, “How should the design community respond if the U.S. Army asked us to join teams to do 'service design' projects in Afghanistan?”
My immediate reaction is to go to the design definition I recently found (notably the 17th definition, if you pull it up on dictionary.com, but hey, it's the last one, so I consider it definitive): "adaptation of means to a preconceived end." If you've got a talent and something can benefit from it, you should apply and nurture that talent and get paid well for the work. This argument, in turn, always brings me to a scene in Terminator 2, when the black engineer realizes that all his excellent and hard work to develop a fantastic machine... has brought (or will bring) worldwide ruin. And this is where as a designer I do feel like evaluating my work on an ethical scale. Or, at the very least, finding something to do with the rest of my time that balances things out in terms of karma.
And then, via one of the discussion contributors to the above, I was treated to
a terrifically entertaining video about... job and career choices, let's just say. I laughed, I cried. What does it all mean? You play it by ear. Then, prepare your résumé...
Last night at the climbing gym I had a discussion with a friend who does some substitute teaching. The prior day she'd subbed an entire day with a particularly difficult group of kids. Kids who were rude, if not mean, to her, and kids who didn't want to be there. The whole day was an exercise in patience, additionally because one of the subjects she had to teach wasn't one she has a real passion for. That kind of day posed a real challenge to her because it really made her wonder if her work mattered, if it made a difference.
Our discussion moved on to her music; lately she's been performing -singing, and playing a guitar- at a few open-mic nights at local coffeehouses. She's terrific: she has a lovely voice, her fingers make lovely sounds with the guitar, and she's written some beautiful songs. But in the last few days she's been feeling less confident about her art, wondering why she's even bothering. I asked her if the "bad days" while sub teaching seem to affect her confidence about her music, and she said yes, probably they do.
Balance, tolerance, degrees, are what it's about. Constant re-evaluation. Thinking. Once a designer (me), always a designer.
Labels: design
my designer went to Flashbelt and all she brought back for me was...
...this photo of foam on the river, shot from the pedestrian bridge at the U.
Seriously, however: Flashbelt was once again chiefly an inspiration. The session topics I chose were rather polarized, with not a whole lot of notable presentations in between widely experimental digitally-initiated and Adobe stumping for its new creative suite. I'm not sure if this observation just illustrates something about me or about Flashbelt, but, well, there you have it.
Experimental Juju:
Jeremy Thorp's "The Pixel Economy" presentation. Be sure to check out his
Plumage project. The
Variance one is good as well.
Joshua Davis is one animated speaker. To illustrate his thoughts on the true organic, and ecstatic, nature of improvisation, he opened up the session by playing this most excellent video of a
Stevie Wonder drum solo. You can check out his Dynamic Abstraction experiments
here. I was sad to discover that, while I did get to see a little of his work at the Cooper-Hewitt a few weeks ago, he has a new and sure-to-be excellent
show in Brooklyn, right now. Dude likes flowers. And fabrics with flowers. Love it.
I felt like I needed more coffee (like, three depth charges) in order to keep up with Paul Ortchanian, but he presented an impressive series of math-driven visual experiments, all of which can be found somewhere on
his site. My conclusion from these presentations: the path to flash enlightenment and fulfillment is right there in front of me, but I will need to forgo some sleep (and other healthful habits as well) in order to gain ground.
Adobe Is God King Of This My Digital World:
Step Inside The Creative Mind. Flash CS3 has some excellent features & I can't wait to try them out. Also, I can do video with Flash (some great tips were provided by
Lisa Larson). Some great examples:
neave.tv and
Caveman's Crib. For sample video clips to get started, I can go to the
Prelinger Archives.
One of the few middle-ground sessions I attended was the Flash Accessibility (see blog
here) Dinner with Adobe's Bob Regan, and it was most informative and enjoyable. Some things I learned: Blindness/some degree of visual disability is not the most common form of disability, but it does have the most effective lobby (and for that reason, it is the main focus of designers concerned with accessibility).
The most common form of disability is cognitive disability-and it is the one disability whose troubles are not solved by using plain text in internet applications.
The best tool a designer can use to improve the accessibility of her work is to get into the habit of testing her work with a screen reader utility. DAILY. TWICE.
Some key concepts for Flash Design for Accessibility: Label, Role, State, and Structure. Be thoughtful and thorough. Other links:
Adobe's Accessibility Resource page.
Also,
David Lowe-Rogstad presented some excellent cases for user-driven online experiences, advising designers to build prototypes, listen to user feedback, and work with it. Topic is well-blogged about
here. Examples included Nike's JoinBode.com site (taken down but reviewed nastily
here). Here's
a book to read.
Labels: design, media
Confessions of this "magazine pervert"
A few days ago I picked up a copy of the most recent issue of "Jane" magazine. It's not one I usually pick up, but I've been a magazine addict for as long as I can remember, and the addiction started when Mom got me a subscription to "Seventeen," at least a year before my actual age even qualified me as a "teenager." So, now and then I like to re-identify with the roots of my addiction, as it were.
I'm completely fascinated by my experience with Jane this week. As I've seen in several other print media over the last few years, this one shows clear signs of infection by the Digital Disease, and it's fabulous. We're not just talking about bright graphics-driven layouts that attempt to tease the reader into "clicking" through the issue, rather then poring through it cover-to-cover or, gasp, using the table of contents. This magazine appears to have removed the persona of authority that fashion and popular culture editors have traditionally embodied. Regardless of whether that authority still there but simply transparent, I really get more of a sense of community, almost like I'm entrenched in a bulletin-board discussion. We have plenty of vocabulary originating from television (ok, YouTube: the revolution is complete). We have not "insider tips" but real-world tips appearing to come from people NOT on the payroll of Maybelline or Calvin Klein. And we have heartfelt calls to collective action, à la: "who's with me here? Let's do this!" I love it.
My little tête-à-tête with Jane also brings to mind the sort of historical role that magazines have (
for some people, anyway): sort of a time capsule, not just of current events, faces and trends, but of methods of advertising persuasion. The language and imagery that can sell a commodity changes with time. As Nick Currie writes in the article cited above, "The consumer society depicted in the pages of old magazines—advertising and editorial both, although the advertising perhaps somewhat more so—has lost its power to seduce, bully or dominate. The products presented look quaint, the future promised farcically fallacious. Everything has been valuably alienated—contextualized, sure, but also de- and re-contextualized...."
What works now? Perhaps the very thing that draws me to the magazine: I already feel loyal to the collective. Curses!
Labels: design, media, pop
Ephemera
One thing that it makes more sense - though logistically it's not so easy - to do with print newspapers than with online news sites is to
compare front pages on big event days. Be sure to click on the "top 30 U.S. Papers" link, just below the first newspaper image.
This posting provides some valuable insight into geography, emotion, time passing, ephemera. The range of headline copy alone provides an interesting study of editorial choices, be they looking forward, sensational, or even combative, such as shown on the Orlando paper.
Also, for a designer, just looking at the "top 30 U.S. Papers" SWF page is an interesting study of scale, type choices, and layout.
Labels: design
