Design Guy

Design Guy, Episode 40, Talking About Type: Let Your Voice Be Heard!

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Fri, 4 Jun 2010 00:10:00 -0700

Talking About Type: Let Your Voice Be Heard!

Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

And before we begin, I'd like to announce my sponsor for the coming episodes. Yes, I have a sponsor. And that's Mark Batty Publisher. Mark Batty is an independent publisher dedicated to making distinctive books on the visual art of communicating. Affordable, well designed, thoughtfully created, and produced to last, MBP books are artful products that readers want to hold onto forever.

A great example of their books, and one that ties in with this episode is the title, "Dot-Font - Talking About Fonts by John D. Berry. You may know Mr. Berry from his dot-font columns at CreativePro.com, which is a site I've enjoyed for many years. Berry, who is both an editor and a designer, himself, talks critically and entertainingly about type designers, font technology, and how lettering and type are ubiquitous in our culture. I've got a copy in my hand right now - It's a beautiful, perfect bound edition, just filled with great visual examples. Again, that's Dot-Font - Talking about Fonts. You can pick it up at markbattypublisher.com or, of course, at Amazon.

Well, we're talking about Type. Typography. And we kicked off the discussion last time with a refresher on the importance of Type as that central and defining element in graphic design. It's what distinguishes it from other arts because everything we do traces to a definite message. A typographic one.

And type is our primary artwork. Those letterforms are the clip art, so to speak, that we reach for above all else. And that's because these characters, these visual symbols, with which we encode our communications are evocative all by themselves. Designers often skip the other visuals, like photos and illustration, altogether, because Type, all by itself, has the power to produce images and emotions, even sound in the human mind.

R. Hunter Middleton, said:

(quote)

"Typography is the voice of the printed page. But typography is meaningless until seen by the human eye, translated into sound by the human brain, heard by the human ear, comprehended as thought, and stored as memory." (unquote).

In the book, Environmental Interpretation, contributor Richard Dahn writes:

(quote)

"In approaching typographic choices, it's helpful to keep in mind that typography has a "visual voice" that is dependent on the typeface chosen, its sizes and organization within (your) format, and the nature of the message. Emphatic messages such as EXTREME DANGER, KEEP OUT would demand the use of a heavy bold sans serif type, while a quote by Aldo Leopold might look better in a Roman serif set with generous line spacing. The visual impact on a sign can welcome the viewer to read and reinforce the meaning and sense of the message, or it can speak in such a dull and confused voice that the viewer will totally ignore the sign, or worse, misinterpret what is being said." (unquote)

And I'm going to keep rolling with one more quotation...

In Alex White's, The Elements of Graphic Design, he begins a chapter titled, "Listening to Type" with a word from El Lissitzky.

Lissitzky says, (quote) "Typographic arrangement should achieve for the reader what voice tone conveys for the listener." (unquote)

White furthers this by saying, "What do we mean by "listening to type"? Imagine listening to a book recorded on tape. The reader's voice changes with the story, helping the listener hear the various characters and emotion. A story told on paper should do the same thing. The "characters" that typographers work with are...headlines, subheads, captions, text, and so forth. These typographic characters are our players and must be matched for both individual clarity and overall unity."

(end of quotation)

Now, a few episodes back, I did what felt like kind of an offbeat, standalone episode called "All the World's a Stage for Designers" - but it plays perfectly to this point. And to quickly summarize some of that episode, all our elements, type included, are not just static things. They're not inert. You know, we tend to think of them that way sometimes. Like we've just got this pile. Just a pile of images and type and color and other stuff. But, like White said, these are our players, they're like actors on the stage. And the point is, is that each one is charged with personality and with power, and as they combine into this ensemble, if you will, we find that they're all very active, and that they all act upon each other. They all have a voice, and as a unified whole, they've got a collective voice that takes on an overall character.

So, this is a big picture thing to keep in mind always when you approach every project as a designer. You want to remind yourself that, in a way, you're speaking to someone with a voice. It's a different modality, a different medium through which we're speaking, it expresses itself first visually as we target the eye, and then the mind. But a voice is heard, nonetheless. We're just doing it through a special medium.

And on the receiving end, our audience infers a tone. Hopefully, it's a clear and consistent one because there are many factors at play in even the simpler compositions. And that's where studying up on the typographic rules and techniques comes in. We want to strive to be clear. We don't want to muddle the message. We don't want the equivalent of static or noise in our transmissions, if you will.

You know, even in our simplest text messages, we're intuitively sensitive to this. Email etiquette has warned us for years about sending people messages in all capital letters. They'll feel like we're shouting at them, just because we hit the CAPS LOCK key before we started typing. I know I re-read important emails before sending them, just to ensure there's no unintended tone of voice. Maybe you've had that experience - somebody thought you were angry based on an email you sent. And if the simplest examples of mere text are expressive, how much moreso our designed things?

When we put on our typographer's hat, and rev up all our machinery, and proceed to exploit all the tools, and settings, and make decisions about typefaces (each one a unique personality), how much more do we have control of that voice, down to the tiniest nuances, just as you would alter the pitch or modulation of your own speaking voice in the course of a delicate conversation.

But, finally, and before this all start to sound cautionary (which is not my intent) let me encourage you to embrace your work as a means of finding your voice. Of letting it be heard. Design is a means of your self-expression. Yes, we've got to maintain the integrity of someone's message, we don't handle it in a self-serving way, we're ultimately objectivists. But your unique stamp will be on your work because YOU are the first medium through which the message passes. And your clients will come to perceive your voice, that style, that authentic expression that IS your work, that is YOU. And they'll want more...of YOU.

So, again, do build your typographic messages with care. Learn the craft rules so that the voice of those elements are clear. But, in so doing, let your own voice be heard.

Well, that's it for today. Thanks for listening. Let me remind you that the transcript and the site where this podcast feed originates is found at designgushow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com. Thanks again. Hope to have you back next time.

Design Guy, Episode 39, Talking About Type: An Introductory Word

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Wed, 26 May 2010 22:14:00 -0700

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Design Guy, Episode 39, Talking About Type: An Introductory Word

Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Today, we turn our attention to Type. That grand subject of design, of graphic design in particular. And we'll seek to just approach the topic. This topic is the Everest of Graphic Design, and from a Graphic Design perspective, this is where a show like this one really begins.

And that's because Typography is the heart and soul of graphic design. It's the bedrock. It's what makes graphic design what it is, and what separates it from other disciplines and arts.

In an early episode, we set down the distinction between graphic design and the fine arts in order to make this very point. And it bears repeating, because often we're not clear on the difference. The lines between the visual arts seem kind of blurry, we might think the difference is one of mere format or of the techniques and tools employed to create the work. And while there's some truth to this, the ultimate distinction has to do with the role and purpose of type in graphic design. A difference in our objectives in using type.

And what is that goal? Well, the goal is simply to communicate somebody's message. And while we might do it in an artful way, maybe an oblique or a slightly ambiguous way (perhaps to stimulate interest and attention and thought), ultimately, however, the message we're communicating is objective. There is a specific piece of communication intended, and, unlike the fine arts, where we're allowed to play in subjective spaces if we wish to, where beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and where meaning or message (if there's any intended) may be inferred in a purely personal way, that is not the case with graphic design.

Graphic Design is a form of art that is linked to an objective typographic message. And that's with the intent of communicating something very definite, and of your audience receiving it as it was intended. And if we think about it, it just can't be otherwise. When Apple runs ads about the iPhone, you can be certain that they'll consider those ads to have failed if somehow you thought they meant for you to buy an Android phone, instead. When the state park posts a sign that says that they're closed at dark, or that you need to curb your dog, that's not open to the whim of your own private interpretation. The intent and the meaning are objective. This is not a realm where you can conclude that 1 +1 = 3, just because it turns you on to think so. So, our success as graphic designers is that we convey a definite message. And our principle means of achieving that goal is to encode the message in type, to craft our communications with all those letterforms that are the stuff of word and thought and meaning.

Okay, so that's my preamble, and a bit of a repetition of points made before, so we'll move on and conclude for today with a couple of thoughts.

My goal in the coming episodes is simply to offer some help with type. And I hope I can do that. Clearly there are limitations to an audio format. So, we'll play to the strengths of it, and leave the heavy lifting to the excellent resources I can recommend in my show notes - books and webpages and such. (1)

To try to convey, say, the anatomy of type - ascenders and bowls and shoulders and stems - would waste your time in this medium - it's much more effective for you to look it up elsewhere. Instead, we'll talk "about" type. We'll take it from the big picture. How to think about it. How to approach it. How to better use it.

And, finally on a personal note (and I try not to make personal notes because the show is not about me), this episode comes after a very busy and disruptive year of change that forced a hiatus from the podcast. It was John Lennon who said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - and that kind of accounts for the gap. We can design our own lives only so far. But I'm at a place now where I think I can resume the project in a more regular way.

Along those lines, let me offer you some encouragement. If you're an artist or designer - ALL your experiences, all of life's excursions and detours, and exposures to various things, even those times of just burn out that take you away from your work for a time - all these things roll into the mix - they're all shaping influences that shape you and, ultimately, your work. I believe, for the better. And the best thing to do - is to just roll with it.

But we'll leave it there for today. To those of you who've stayed subscribed, glad to have you back. And if you're new to the podcast, I do hope you'll find some help here. Thanks for listening. And, until next time, this is Design Guy.

References:

1. Some Excellent Books on Type:

Designing with Type: A Basic Course in Typography; James Craig; Watson-Guptil

The Elements of Typographic Style; Robert Bringhurst; Hartley and Marks

Type in Use: Effective Typography for Electronic Publishing; Alex White; W.W. Norton & Co.

Design Guy, Episode 38, Adopt a Negative Attitude

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Wed, 27 May 2009 11:04:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Today we'll discuss why, sometimes, you've got to get negative to be positive. No, we're not talking creative mood swings here, or how to channel your anger into your work, or anything like that. We're talking about "negative space." And how giving attention to the negative space can strengthen our design compositions.

Okay, so what exactly is "negative space"?

Well, first of all, negative space is kind of an unfortunate phrase because the word "negative" is such a downer, but in the context of art and design, it is simply the opposite of positive space. Now, of course, that's not so helpful since we haven't defined positive space, either, so let's start there...

Positive space is the shape of your foreground elements. If, say, you're looking at an illustration of a hippopatomus performing a high-wire act, carrying an umbrella - all the elements I've just described - the hippo, the umbrella, the high wire, make up the foreground elements. Taken together, their collective silhoutte defines the positive space. On the other hand, the space that surrounds her is the negative space (and yes, the hippo is a girl). So, if you were to take a marker and color in everything but the hippo, the high-wire and umbrella, you will have defined the negative space.

Here's another example, drawn from Betty Edward's "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain."(1) Edwards reminds us of the old Warner Bros. cartoons, where Bugs Bunny reacts to something an runs. Maybe it was that episode in the mad scientist's castle with that big, orange haired monster wearing tennis shoes. Anyway, he panics and he runs, slamming right through a door, leaving a Bugs Bunny shaped hole behind. And it's that hole in the door that we want to remember. Because, in that hole, we see the exact shape of Bugs Bunny - his head and ears, his arms and legs, all perfectly circumscribed. So, that hole represents the positive shape, the positive space of Bugs. And it's what's left behind of the door that is the negative space, because the remaining part of the door captured the negative shape surrounding Bugs Bunny. I like this example because the the door put us in mind of our canvas or page which is almost always a rectangle of some sort. And with the positive space extracted (i.e., the shape of Bugs Bunny), what we've got left is our negative space.

If you've logged as many hours as I have watching Chuck Jones cartoons, then this example is great and visual, and you'll never forget how to describe negative space.

I mentioned this came out of Betty Edwards' book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and if you're anything like me, somewhat frustrated with your drawing abilities, you'll want to grab this title for your library because it can really help you, really help you translate what you see to the page. It's also chock full of dramatic before and after examples of her students' work, which start out as just, totally juvenile looking stuff (I mean, stuff that looks like third-grade art class), but that progress, in some cases, to some pretty mature work.

And not to digress too far on this subject of drawing, I was very encouraged once reading an interview with designer, Paula Scher. (2) If you don't know who she is, Paula Scher is an acclaimed designer with a very distinctive typographic style. She recounted about how she drew the honest conclusion that she couldn't draw all that well, but that she loved type, and focused on how to compose type and image together in innovative ways. And now, artistically challenged Paula Scher is at the top of her field. So, just a quick anecdote to encourage some of you out there. Designers can feel very insecure about their work and their abilities, and it helps to hear things like that now and then.

Back to negative space...

Edwards, like many art teachers, instructs her students to draw the negative space, rather than the positive space. Instead of focusing on a positive element, a model's arm, for example, they're told to draw the shapes around the arm. And they often get more accurate results when they do so because they're building on those shapes. This may also have something to do with right brain / left brain theory, the way our minds switch modes, that accounts for this, but nevertheless it really does work. So, for example, if you were to draw a picture of someone standing with their hands on their hips, rather than draw the positive shapes of their arms, you might start with the triangular shapes that occur BETWEEN the arms and the torso. You're still drawing the arm, but your focus is indirect.

Edwards reports that her students experience a kind of ephiphany after being introduced to negative space, because they see the world differently. And because the right brain is associated with creativity, and that blissed out, feeling of euphoria we get when we're in that mode, her students report that the world is prettier and more interesting to them as they look at it anew. And best of all, they get dramatically better results in their drawing.

So, how does this help us as designers? How is this practical?

When we scrutinize negative space, and take it into account, it helps us make decisions. It helps us diagnose problems. It helps us decide where to put elements on a page. And especially when we're in that stage when we're shifting things around, trying to find the best spot for your essential elements, paying attention to the negative shapes can help greatly.

I know that I frequently find myself in a restless place when I'm working, moving things all over the page, and scaling things up, scaling them down. Balancing things various ways. Or I may have worked out this great typographic solution for a headline, pairing large and small type together, and I really like it, but then I'm hating the way it interacts with the other elements on the page, and so I discard the arrangement for some other solution. And a lot of what drives this unrest that we experience is the negative space. We're not happy with the ways we're shaping the negative space. And remember, you're always sculpting white space on the page. We'll talk about that more directly another time, but we want to keep that in mind. Every movement, every action, has an equal and opposite reaction, and that principle certainly applies to our dealings with positive and negative space. Often this process is subconcious and intuitive, but we're restless just the same, because isn't working and we're troubled by it. So, a graphic designer who remembers to think beyond the positive elements on the page, to pay conscious attention to the negative shapes he or she is creating, stands a better chance of solving the compositional problem.

By the way, this is a universal experience for designers. Paul Rand (3) did a famous piece involving an abacus. It was that act of shifting the beads of an abacus around until we're satisfied stands as his metaphor for the design process.

Negative space becomes especially important and interesting when we use it to form shapes that are just as significant, perhaps moreso, than the positive elements. This act of "bringing the background into the foreground" with meaningful negative shapes can be seen in many corporate logos, as I've mentioned a number of times before. So, keep your eyes peeled for those, they're a great source of instruction to designers.

Well, I'm going to leave it right there for now, although there's much more we can say about this subject. The problems of white space, issues like trapped white space, for example. But, we'll have to hit such issues at a later time. For now, I want to thank you very much for listening. And I'll ask that if you're enjoying the show, please consider taking a moment to leave a descriptive review at iTunes, which will help the show's rankings and encourage others to subscribe.

And as always, you can get a transcript at designguyshow.blogspot.com, music is by Kcentricity.com. By the way, I've added my twitter link at designguyshow.blogspot.com, sotake . Well, I thank you again, and I hope to have you back next time.

References:

1. Betty Edwards, Drawing On The Right Side of the Brain, Tarcher, 1999

2. Paula Scher

3. Paul Rand - Abacus

Design Guy, Episode 37, All the World's a Stage for Designers

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Wed, 4 Mar 2009 13:53:00 -0800

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

When beginning a new project, as much as is within your power to do so, choose the best of elements. You're going to be selecting type and image, among other things, and when you do, choose thoughtfully.

Think of this as as an audition. If you were to assemble a high-caliber theatrical production, you'd screen for the best talent. There would be a line of candidates waiting in the wings, fidgeting nervously, awaiting their turn to show you what they've got. And you'd stock your ensemble with just the right personalities for the roles they were to play. You'd want them all to be great and capable and hardworking and suited for the personality into which they are to breathe life.

But more than that, with an eye toward the ensemble you're putting together, you'd cast individuals who combine well, who coalesce into something...more. And now you're thinking chemistry, you're thinking alchemy, because you know that something magical and transcendent can happen when elements combine. Humphrey Bogart is great by himself, but put him together with Ingrid Bergman and something else is going on, something special. In the narrative arts, the craft term for this is orchestration. Elements are selected because they differ from or complement other elements. One character might be meant to serve as a foil to another. And so they act upon each other. And your job at this early, critical phase is to stage all the elements and action, keeping that broad picture in mind. How do the elements stand together? How do they combine? Is there good chemistry? What's the overall effect?

This analogy to actors and such is helpful because we sometimes view individual elements as just static things when, in reality, each one is charged with personality and with power. Each one is an active agent in the mix.

So, applying the analogy to design, what are we talking about?

Well, in the stage that is our design. In the theater of our composition, we do well to remember our audience. Think of it! There's an audience out there that will be responding to what we do, reacting to the world and ensemble that we put together. Dramatists intend their audience to laugh or cry or feel a sense of foreboding or perhaps be so terrified that they jump from their seats. They are out to provoke a reaction. And we designers share the same aspiration. We want our work to be evocative and to communicate feeling. Or as the ever-quotable Seth Godin has said, "Communication is the transfer of emotion."

So, let's say you're starting with your choice of type. Work hard to choose those typefaces. Give them thought. Like a casting call, you're looking for the right personalities. As an Anthony Hopkins or a Michael Caine are suited for mature, dignified, masculine performances, so also are classical typefaces like Garamond or Baskerville. And having filled that role, consider how these might combine with other elements. But be careful. There's likely a reason why Paris Hilton hasn't worked with Anthony Hopkins. And perhaps comic sans isn't fit to share the same stage with Sir Garamond. (I'm getting carried away.) But do look for interesting contrasts and complements and you'll start to get excited as the big picture develops. And if you're feeling it, then trust your instincts because they're a good, early indication that, when the curtain rises and your new design debuts, your audience will be feeling it, too.

Design Guy, Episode 36, Unity Revisited / Emphasis

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:59:00 -0800

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Well, when last we met, we were concluding a short tour of the gestalt rules, aka "the principles of perception," where "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," and where our minds make meaning through our instinctive human tendency to visually group things together. In other words, we're wired to make associations between things. To mentally batch process them, and thereby simplify many, many things as just a few groups, or to ignore them altogether. And we can't help it. And thank goodness it works this way or we might go stark raving mad trying to reckon with every last thing in our field of vision.

Now, that excursion into gestalt came as a result of our original exploration, which was on the subject of Unity.

To refresh our memories, Unity echoes the very definition of Design itself, because Design is the process of creating order out of chaos, of taking what might start out as nothing but a senseless jumble of individual elements and organizing them into unified whole.

And it's that idea of Wholeness, or Oneness that we're always after as Designers. In fact it's what's operating beneath the surface, it's what's driving us, tugging at our hearts and minds and making our hands move as we're working. And it's what you might call the "E Pluribus Unum of Design", to coin a phrase taken directly from American coinage. "Out of Many, One" - one thing emerges. We achieve one effect.

This is the grand aim of design. This is design itself. It's the difference between randomness and intelligence, between chaos and order, between designs that seem to disintegrate and fall apart before our eyes, and those compositions where everything seems to fly in formation.

So, how do we do it?

Well, as we've said before, a good start is to make sure you've achieved balance in your composition. Now, this balance can be symmetrical or it can be asymmetrical, but it should be there nonetheless. You can get a refresher on balance, by revisiting the older episodes in which we covered the topic.

But Unity requires more than just balance, which leads us to the next principle we'll explore, and that principle is Emphasis.

Emphasis, as you might guess, is all about focus. Emphasis draws our focus by making us aware of a dominant element in our composition. Think of it this way, if all the elements in our composition are given equal attention, if they all speak in an equal voice, then what we've got is a cacophony. We don't know where to focus. Everything vies for our attention. And, ironically, nothing vies for our attention.

By creating certain points of interest in our composition by scaling an object larger than the rest. Or by using contrast to make it leap forth in our awareness. Or by centering it, or coloring it differently, or any number of other techniques, we create a point of interest. Or, as I like to think of it, we create an entry point.

Typographers think in terms of first read, second read, etc. And the obvious example is the large, bold headline. This serves as the entry point. It's an enticement. Surely, we can't help but see that element. And it beckons to us. It says, come on in, the water's fine! I know you don't think you're in the mood to read the whole thing, so just read this short headline first. And then, maybe you'll warm to reading the large, two-sentence sub-paragraph. And by then, if you're hooked. You're deep into the body copy, reading the entire article. It's a devious trick we typographers play, but who'd want it any other way? Who'd want to look at a marginless, block of type, every sentence, every word speaking in equal voice. Nothing shouts to us. Nothing calls our attention. It's quite off-putting, really.

And this is how strictly visual compositions work. A poster consisting of mostly colors and shapes has still got something to say to us. But what's it going to lead with? What image or element is going grab our eyeballs and make us peruse the rest of it?

By having primary, dominant elements, other elements serve, and support the composition as secondary or tertiary sub-dominant elements.

And before we know it, we've got all elements flying in formation. We've got a visual hierarchy that works! We've got the stuff of unity.

Well, that's it for today. Let me remind you that a transcript of the show, as always, is available at DesignGuyShow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com. Thanks for tuning in, and I hope to have back next time.

Design Guy, Episode 35, Proximity and Alignment

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Thu, 4 Dec 2008 14:05:00 -0800

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Today, we'll bring an end to this exploration of the principles of perception, also known as the Gestalt rules by discussing Proximity and Alignment.

Now there's more to Gestalt than what we've covered in this series, but I trust this has given you a foothold on the topic. But let's get right to it.

Proximity

Proximity is something we understand intuitively. It requires no explanation when we see it. If we're at a party, we'll see certain kinds of people around us. Some will be standing by themselves with drinks in their hands, looking around. Others will congregate in groups of two or three or five or six, and we "get it." Those that are standing close together form a group. Even when they stop talking and interacting, we still see them as a group by virtue of their proximity.

Or think of high school. There were groups of jocks. Groups of freaks. There were loners. Maybe there were gangs when you went to school. And we perceive these persons, we comprehend these individual elements, if you will, based on their relationships and context. They are either separate and individual, or they're perceived as part of a group. And it's just like our compositions.

If we have a more or less even distribution of shapes or elements, they all tend to stand alone. They're not in proximity to anything in particular. But when we bring elements together as a cluster or collective or group, we view them as a new thing. Something bigger.

And this helps us comprehend our environment. Complicated clusters of elements get simplified in our minds as one thing. They are that group or cluster, and this frees our minds from having to deal with them as individual units to be inventoried in our brain individually. You can mentally batch process the whole lot of them.

This is important to understand in our designs. If we don't use proximity to our advantage, then our audience has to mentally sort through all that we put before them. On the other hand, when we put like things together, as a logical group, we've put convenient handles on them. Now all those things are glanceable. You can take them all in at once.

Some examples. Think of web pages. Often we see various tiers of navigation. One group of links relate to global navigation, links like "home" or "about us" or "contact us". Another set of links might be grouped according to related product categories, like at Amazon, where they group "movies, music, and games" as one link, as opposed to another labeled "apparel, shoes $ jewelry". It's this grouping that enable us to cope with all the information. It gives it logic and order and hierarchy. We can put convenient cognitive handles on a bunch of stuff at once.
There's many more examples that I'm sure you can come up with on your own because proximity is so intuitive. The trick is to think logically as you order groups of elements in your compositions. You're really using it as a strategy to streamline your audience's comprehension of what you've set before them.

And, finally, I want to touch on Alignment today. Although I'll probably go into it in more detail at a later date.

Alignment is simply the technique of organizing elements by lining them up. When we look at a page, we don't see visible lines, but we do notice that headline, and subhead, and bodycopy and related image are usually on the same vertical axis. At least this is usually the case. Or there are enough elements lined up on that invisible vertical line for us to sense their relatedness.

Or we may see shapes that organized according to a central axis. We might call them center justified. Or the left edges all line up. (This is also called ragged right). Or it's the right edges that all line up (and this is alternatively called ragged left.) The difference among these examples is edge alignment versus center alignment. And all of us have at least some experience with this in this because we've played with those justification buttons in programs like Microsoft Word.

Earlier still, we might have been the kid who always had the toys scattered randomly on the floor. It was hard to see the relationship among our hotwheels or star wars action figures as a result.

On the other hand, we might have been the kid who neatly lined up the toys on our shelves. Our Smurf figures looked orderly and related. They were aligned AND grouped in proximity to one another, and it probably made all the difference to Mom.

Well, that's it for today. This one ran a little longer than usual, but then I've been away for a little while, for which I apologize, so I thought I'd cover a just bit more.

Well, let me remind you that today's transcript may be found at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by kcentricity.com. Well, I thank you again for tuning in and I hope you'll join us next time.

Design Guy, Episode 34, Visual Momentum (Continuance)

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:34:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show, this is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

In our continuing series on Unity, we've been discussing the Gestalt Principles, and to remind once again, this is all about perception, and even closer to home, it's all about our goals in composition, that is, it's about how we perceive a unified whole, and how that whole is actually greater than the sum of its parts.

Today, we'll look at the next rule in Gestalt, which is called Continuation. Another name we could give to Continuation is "Visual Momentum." Now, we all know what momentum is in physics. But in the visual realm, there's a tendency for our eyes, once directed, to continue moving in a certain direction. So, definitions describe continuation as this tendency for us to continue looking in a given direction, until we see something of importance, a dominant element in our composition.

But continuation more often has to do with how our eyes follow through, even through intervening objects as we track along a certain visual path. A simpler way to describe this is to say that our eyes will follow along a line, or a path, or curve, and perceive it as a continuous line, even if it crosses another line or object. So, for example, a lower case "t" looks like just two lines, rather than four lines that happen to be meeting in the middle. A lower case "t," or the letter "x" then, provide us examples where two lines, or two strokes, are crossing each other. In other words, we percieve them as following through, or as a "continuation" right through each other. They cross each other. At least that's how it looks to our minds, even though, strictly speaking, we could just as accurately define such a form as four lines connecting at a central point.

In design, we see this concept of continuation in a number of ways. Sometimes it's in the way elements are composed, we suggest a direction that our eye wants to follow, such as in a progression of shapes. In photography, our eyes naturally want to wend their way down paths such as roads and rivers, or perspective lines, like railroad tracks, or across a telephone wire til we reach two sparrows perched on the other end. In typography, we have an obvious and built-in sense of continuation, because, in effect, we're lining up a long string of letterforms for our eyes to move across, as a path. And, on the other hand, in the case of long, narrow columns of newspaper type, we're cued to read, not so much from right to left, but from top to bottom. And, of course, the narrower the column, the more we suggest speed. And this is why typographers avoid those big, dense, margin-less blocks of type, with over-long measures. It just feels like a brick wall, it feels inert, the opposite of something that would offer our eyes visual momentum or continuation.

But in the final analysis, continuation is simply about directing our viewer's attention. Maybe we want to guide their eyes by taking advantage of those perspective lines and send their eyeballs wandering down the path, or maybe we'll use an imaginary line suggested by some kind of pointing device, like an arrow, or the good, old fashioned pointed finger.

So, make mental note as you see ads or posters or other compositions to ask yourself, where's the continuation? What path or progression, what set of perspective lines or curves are being employed to create that sense of visual momentum that gets our eyes going in the intended direction?

Well, that's it for today. Let me remind you that a full transcript of this show may be found at designguyshow.blogspot.com, music is by kcentricity.com. And as election fever mounts, I'll ask you to cast your vote at podcast alley, or simply leave a comment at iTunes. Well, thanks again for listening, and I hope you'll join us next time.

Design Guy, Episode 33, All in the Family (Similarity)

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Sat, 4 Oct 2008 05:27:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.
Well we're in the midst of a discussion on Unity, and as a part of that topic, we've taken a detour through what are called the gestalt rules. So, if you're joining us midstream, let's recap a few points.

Fist of all, Gestalt theory gets its name from a School of thought in Psychology, which began in the early 20th century in Germany. And this school of thought says that, when it comes to studying human behavior, we need see the big picture, we need to discern broader patterns of behavior, not just isolated psychological events. It's in the big picture that we get our insights.

But this concept carries over to visual studies as a way to explain how we can achieve a unified composition out of individual parts. And it even goes beyond that to assert that a unified whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

And so far we've discussed a couple of gestalt concepts, namely figure-ground and closure, which you can catch up on by downloading those episodes.

But moving right along, I'd like to step though some more gestalt rules today, starting with the rule of Similarity. And as we take these one by one, we'll see that they're really pretty simple and straightforward. The hardest part might be remembering the terminology.

Now, the rule of Similarity, just as you'd expect, says that a composition looks more unified if the elements are similar in some respect. If objects are similar, they look related. Just like people. Identical twins are obviously related to each other. But brothers or sisters that share physical characteristics can also look obviously related. It's when siblings don't look much like each other that people express surprise that they're actually related. They scratch their chin and say, "Really? I just don't see the family resemblance." And this is what it's like in our compositions. As we compose, we can put the same traits in elements if we intend for them to look unified.

And those traits can include shape, or size, or color or value. If you're a media designer, we might include similarity of motion, or any other attribute that will demonstrate similarity. If they look related, people will see them as a pattern or group, and your composition will convey a stronger sense of unity. And, again, its just like how we can intuit a family if we see a group of people that share genetic traits.

On the other hand, once we've established that pattern, once we've got a unified pattern, then we can go on and do more interesting things. We can direct attention to where we want it. If, among a row of black dots, one solitary dot is colored red, then it stands out, and we've got a device that will direct attention. Or if one of those dots is oversized compared to the rest, we've got a point of emphasis in an otherwise unified composition. In other words, we've tampered with those traits. Having established consistency in terms of shape, size, color, or value, we break the pattern.

And it's like that old Sesame Street song about one of these kids is doing his own thing, one of these kids just isn't the same. If you remember that song, you'll appreciate the example. If you don't, well, never mind.
A great exercise is to pay attention to logos, especially ones that are composed of more than just a few elements. If the logo is any good, that is, if it's unified, then you can look at it and ask yourself some questions. You can deconstruct it in terms of this rule of Similarity. And so you'll usually be looking at a bunch of shapes, or perhaps a bunch of lines or strokes, and you can ask yourself, what is similar about them? What makes the cohere as a group? Is there an element that seems to stand out for emphasis? And how does that stand-out element break the pattern?

And by the way, this is really the best way to learn design. You learn design by looking at examples, good and bad, and getting good at deconstructing them. In the same way a mechanic figures out what going on with your car, you want to put these design examples up on the lift, so to speak, and see how they work. Take them apart with your eyes, if you can, and put them back together again. That's how you extract the secret or principle that you can apply to your own work.
Well, that's the rule of Similarity, and that's all we've got time for today. Let me remind you that a transcript of today's program may be found at designguyshow.blogpsot.com, music is by kcentricity.com. Well, thank you again for tuning in and I hope to have you back again.

Design Guy, Episode 32, We're All Seeking Closure

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 04:19:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

In our continuing series on Unity, we're exploring Gestalt Theory - which is about perception, and how our minds make meaningful wholes out of incomplete parts. But as a topic of design study, it's a way of putting designers in the driver's seat. In other words, these concepts help us control how our audience sees what we put in front of them. It allows us to control the points of emphasis, among other things, so we can communicate in a more controlled way.

So moving right along, the next Gestalt concept we want to cover is Closure. Closure describes something that our our minds do to help us fill in the blanks. If a square is composed of a broken or dashed line, we understand it to be a square. We accept it as a square. It's not truly a square because of the spaces between the bits of line, but our minds of forgiving of this, and accept it as a square. If we see a half-shadowed face, we fill in the blanks. We accept that there is another side of the face. Otherwise, we might scream in horror over missing eyes and ears.

And this is a really good thing to know if you're ever stranded on a desert island. You can have full confidence that when you form the word, "S.O.S," out of rocks on the beach, the rescue plane pilot won't just see a bunch of scattered stones, he'll recognize your distress call for what it is and pick you up.

But Closure does another important thing for designers. It teaches us an important sensibility. And that's that you don't have to be super-explicit all the time. You don't have to overplay your hand to get the job done. Your audience can put together a whole lot of meaning out of a few elements. And this reminds us not to visually over-explain, or to underestimate our audience. We can take a less-is-more approach with assurance that they'll "get it." So go ahead and imply a human face with a few odd, unlikely objects. Your audience will discern that face and smile at how clever you were, and how clever they were for being able to see it. Or go ahead and suggest additional letterforms using the figure-ground technique we discussed last time. Your audience will perceive that letter, and you're client will thank you for making a slicker logo for them.

But, that's Closure. And the stronger the gestalt effect is, which is a function of strong grouping, the easier it is for your audience to see the intended effect. In that SOS example, imagine if the stones on the beach were left unattended, and the tide began to move them apart, weakening the grouping. That would certainly make it harder for the pilot to see those letterforms. So, like most things, there's a balance you'll want to strike between clarity and ambiguity. And it's up to the designer to make that call.

Well, that's it for today. This one was brief, but like that Closure sensibility, why overplay my hand, why overexplain?

I'll just remind you that, as always, a transcript may be found at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com. And if you're enjoying this ongoing series, please vote for the program at podcast alley, or at the iTunes profile page, and I'll thank you in advance for doing so, as I thank you once again for tuning in.

Design Guy, Episode 31, Figure-Ground

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:12:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

We're talking about Unity, which we've described as the compositional goal of taking many elements and fashioning them into a cohesive whole. In other words, we don't want our audience to be distracted by the parts and pieces of a thing, we want them to see the big picture, and want them to see it in way where everything ties together, everythings feels integral, everything hangs together as one piece, and creates one effect. And as we pointed out, this is essentially the definition of design, itself.

So, in keeping with this idea, we're taking a short tour through Gestalt theory, which is about perception as a dynamic process. It's about making meaning out of what we see, and how our minds want to make meaninful patterns out of chaos. And we do this by perceptually organizing what we're looking at. As we look around, as we survey our environment, we begin to infer a sense of structure and relationship among the things we see. And we do this so we can quickly come to terms with it all, to make sense of it all. And in a survival sense, it makes sense that our minds want to know what we're up against, so we can react appropriately.

In visual design, we learn how to apply these principles of perception so we can aid that process. Generally speaking, we want to make things as intuitive and as instant as we can. Because the goal is communicate, to transmit meaning rapidly, and make sure people get the message.

So, I'd like to give a quick rundown of these Gestalt rules, or tools, starting with what's called figure / ground. Figure/Ground is a way of understanding the visual field before us. If we see a man, for example, standing in the street, we see the man as the figure, and everything else as ground. And depending on how clear that distinction is to us, we'll have a stronger or weaker sense of which is which. The distinction between figure and ground is usually achieved by contrast. The darkness or lightness of a figure, for example, will clarify it as the figure. Or maybe the background is blurry, whereas the figure is in focus. Or maybe the distinction has something to do with the composition, since the placement of the figure can influence our perception of it. As designers, we want to get skillful at controlling the balance of figure and ground, and sometimes even making it purposely uncertain, in order to achieve a certain effect.

And I'll ask you to call to mind the famous optical illusion of the faces and the vase. This is the one that usually depicts a white vase against a black field. I remember personally encountering this for the first time as a kid on a cub scout trip to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which is basically a science museum. One of the exhibits featured this image. And I remember that as I looked at that vase, an unexpected surprise happened. I sensed a kind of shift, as the foreground and background flipped positions, and suddenly the shape of two faces, two facing profiles emerged. Those black shapes - the faces - were now the foreground and the white vase was pushed back into space. It was all my own perception, but it was powerful nonetheless. Powerful enough for me to recall the experience vividly, some thirty years later.

You may also remember the famous Gestalt picture of the old lady and the young woman. At first glance, you see a young woman, head turned away from us. But as you continue looking, you may see the face of an old lady emerge.

The reason this kind of switch or flip occurs is due to a perceptual decision that we make. Our minds decide that one thing is the figure, and the rest ground. One thing appears as foreground, the rest is background. So if an image is ambiguous in this respect, this figure-ground flip is likelier to happen, as we seek to wrap our perceptual mind around the subject. So, this is kind of an internal decision making process that we're not necessarily aware of. Our minds do it in order to make sense of what we're looking at.

M.C. Escher famously manipulated our sense of figure and ground with his popular sketches, a perrenial favorite in the form of coffee table books and mugs and mouse pads

And graphic designers continually exploit figure ground. They do this for a lot of reasons. One reason is that it's just a neat optical trick, as we've pointed out. But the best reason is that it's just so efficient. It's elegant. Think about it. Why introduce additional figure, why add another positive element, when you can imply another element from the ground? It's a way of making 1 +1 = 3, of getting more from less, of pulling a rabbit out of hat. And that's why the shining examples in graphic design are those classic corporate logos. Look up Saul Bass' wonderful and enduring Girl Scout logo, for example, and you'll see a cascade of faces constructed out of just a couple of shapes and an activated background. Bass works magic with this mark. He brings the background into the foreground in such a way that the sum is greater than the parts.

I'll admit this is a tough one to describe in words alone. So, I'll encourage you to continue this little lesson on your own by searching Google images for stuff like the Girl Scout logo, or the works of M.C. Escher. It's helpful to explain how figure ground works, but you've just got to see it to appreciate it.

But I think that'll do for today. Let me remind you that a transcript of today's episode may be found at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by kcentricity.com. I look forward to having you back again.

Design Guy, Episode 30, Seeing Unity (Gestalt)

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Fri, 1 Aug 2008 14:47:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

We're talking about Unity. And when we began this discussion last episode, we said that unity is a goal of composition - unity describes how a multiplicity of elements combine to achieve one efffect. And this concept hearkens back to the fundmental definition of design we layed down in our earliest episodes, when we said that Design is the process of creating order out of chaos, as we fashion many disparate elements into an ordered unit.

But how does Unity work? How is it that one design is perceived to be more unified than another? And that's the key phrase, "perceived to be." Because this discussion lands us squarely in the territory of perception. And it's all perception, when you think of it. Our designs are nothing but bits of paper and ink, or illuminated pixels. It's what our minds of make of those bits and pieces that matters. And while we may not entirely understand how our minds work, we know we can aid cognition by understanding some principles of perception.

So, today I'd like to introduce the ideas behind what is called Gestalt Theory. And don't let the terminology scare you, Gestalt Theory is concerned with how our minds connect the dots, so to speak, forming a coherent whole out of incomplete parts. A puzzle with missing pieces still provides enough relational and contextual clues for us to discern that emergent whole.

And you may recall that we touched on this idea somewhat in the episode on Shape, when I said that this was a cognitive imperative, the way our minds compulsively and continuously make meaning out of stimuli around us, even connecting random things. And I can't help being reminded of the scene in Woody Allen's Take The Money and Run, when he tells his analyst that the ink blot looks like two elephants making love to a male glee club. But I digress.

So, what Gestalt theory does is make much of context and relationships. When it comes to meaning, it's all in the WAY we put things together. Where is the element? What's next to it? Does this element stand alone or is it part of a group? These are the kinds of questions that are important.

One Gestalt analogy is how we can take a collection of individual musical notes and organize them as a unified melody. We can even transpose it to another key, which makes us use a different set of notes, yet we still recognize the same melody. The unity is persistent because the relationship of the notes has not changed. The intervals and duration and sequence are still the same. So, carrying this idea over to design, it makes us think in compositional terms, because the unity that we hope to create on the page has altogether to do with context and relationships.

But more on that next time, I think we have enough to chew on for today.

For now, let me remind you that a transcript of today's show can be found at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by kcentricity.com. If you're enjoying this series, don't forget to click subscribe in iTunes, so that you're automatically notified of new installments. And while you're there, consider leaving a comment at the profile page, which will encourage others to tune in, and I'll thank you in advance for doing so. And I thank you for tuning in today.

Design Guy, Episode 29, Unity: Out of Many, One

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:13:00 -0700

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Design Guy, here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

We concluded our recent series on balance with a quotation from Alex White's book, The Elements of Graphic Design. White tells us:

"Balance is an important route to achieving unity in design. If the various elements are seen to be in balance, the design will look unified. It will make a single impression. If a design is out of balance, its constituent parts will be more visible than the overall design."
(end of quotation.)

These remarks provide a nice segue into the topic of unity. And they also echo the very first definition we laid down for design itself. To refresh your memories, we said that Design is the process of creating order out of chaos, of taking many disparate elements and forming them into an ordered unit, or a unified whole.

So, that idea of wholeness, the E Pluribus Unum of Design, if you will, where from many things we attain one thing, or we achieve one effect is a very important concept both to have and to maintain as we're working. Especially on projects of any scope or scale. My own work experience has consisted of large-scale projects, spanning months or even years, contracts requiring multiple teams of people to execute, with a variety of taskings.

When you find yourself in this situation, you can easily miss the forest for the trees. You find that you're working on your own tree, and that, after a while, that's potentially all you can see. So achieving a unified effect becomes an even greater challenge on large, complex projects. And this is why direction is necessary. We need directors on large projects to maintain alignment toward a unified vision of an end product.

Movies are a perfect example of this. And the more you think about it, it seems almost miraculous that so many elements can come together so well in spite of the scale of a modern motion picture. There's the music, the special effects, the casting, and the myriad of other components of such a production. Then there's the screenplay itself - often having been passed through many hands after having been in development hell for years. Then there's the director's vision, the studio's input, the test audience results that influence the final product. It's a miracle that films turn out as coherent as they tend to be. And so it's also no wonder that there are many films that just don't work. Whose elements don't come together gracefully at all.

But that's the singular idea I want to impart today about unity. Unity achieves one effect. Everything works as a balanced whole.

On the other hand, where unity is weak, we find ourselves too conscious of the parts, we're distracted by the parts and pieces. We see the trees instead of the forest. And again, going with the movie analogy, this is a bit like when a supporting actor winds up stealing all the scenes, upstaging all the other actors in the ensemble. Instead of the blend of a strong ensemble, we're aware of strong actors and weak ones, and it spoils the unity. Every link in the chain has to hold its weight, or unity is broken.

But let's drive this concept home with a quote from Robin Landa's Graphic Design Solutions:

"Unity is one of the goals of composition. Unity allows the viewer to see an integrated whole, rather than unrelated parts. We know from studies in visual psychology that the viewer wants to see unity; if a viewer cannot see unity in a design, he or she will lose interest." (end of quotation).

Well that's if for today. Let me remind you that a transcript of today's show may be found at the webpage, at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by kcentricity.com.

And just a note about the show entries at iTunes. I've been bumping up against a 25 show limit that is a result of a limitation that, I believe, traces itself to my blogger page, where the feed originates. This means that every time a new episode shows up at iTunes, an early episodes drops off the list. So, I'm researching a solution that will allow even the earliest shows to appear in iTunes, without destroying the iTunes profile page and its history. Meanwhile, if you'd like to hear those early episodes, just go to designguyshow.blogspot.com and download the early episodes from the blog pages themselves. Each entry has a download link at the top of its page.

But, again, I do thank you for tuning in, and I hope to have you back next time.

References

1. White, Alex, The Elements of Graphic Design, Allworth Press, 2002

2. Landa, Robin, Graphic Design Solutions, OnWord Press, 2000

Design Guy, Episode 28, Balance On Balance

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:09:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

We're in the midst of a discussion on balance, and in the previous episodes we discussed how elements act as optical weights within certain balancing schemes - and those schemes are typically classified as either symmetrical or asymmetrical. And we spoke about some of the implications and the effects - the feel that we get - out of those schemes.

Alex White, in his book, The Elements of Graphic Design, defines balance, and also sums up those balancing schemes as follows:

"Balance, or equilibrium, is the state of equalized tension. It is not necessarily a state of calm....Symmetrical, of formal, balance is vertically centered and is visually equivalent on both sides. Symmetrical designs are static and evoke feelings of classicism, fomality, and constancy.

Asymmetrical, or informal, balance attracts attention and is dynamic....(and it) requires a variety of sizes and careful distribution of white space. Asymmetrical designs evoke feelings of modernism, forcefulness, and vitality.'
(end of quotation.)

And that's more or less what we concluded, except that we emphasized the notion that if symmetry is essentially static, then asymmetry, on the other hand, suggests movement, because the equilibrium we've achieved is a dynamic one, made up of unequal parts, in an imperfectly resolved layout.

Now, before we get too conclusive about this distinction, I'd suggest that symmetrical designs can suggest motion also. Think of a paint spatter shape. Now if the splash radiates out pretty equally, we could call it an example of formal balance, or its close cousin, radial balance (to introduce a new term), nevertheless its shape is highly suggestive of action and movement. Not to mention the choice of color and and other elements that we could employ to further heighten our sense of dynamism. Like a tie-died t-shirt, symmetrical designs can be extremely dynamic if there are other things going on besides balance.

So, I wanted to provide my own counterpoint to the general truisms that we outlined before.

Now, finally, there's one more kind of balance we should touch on before moving on to another topic. This one is called "Crystallographic Balance" otherwise known as "Overall balance."

This describes those compositions that are set up in a mosaic or grid. If you're familiar with Mondrian, think of one of his grid compositions, consisting of primary colors and black grid lines. Or maybe Warhol's painting of Mao Tse Tung, where the same portrait appears in three rows of three. These can be done well, but in general they tend to lack any point of emphasis or distinct focal point, so graphic designers will want to create a better sense of hierarchy and order by staying away from the purest form of Overall balance, which tends to just have too many elements everywhere. By creating a compromised version of overall balance, with less elements, you stand a better chance of establishing focus and contrast and reading order.

I'll sum up by quoting White once more, when he says:

"Balance is an important route to achieving unity in design. If the various elements are seen to be in balance, the design will look unified. It will make a single impression. If a design is out of balance, its constituent parts will be more visible than the overall design."
(end of quotation.)

But that's it for now. Sorry for the delay on getting this one out, but my life has been a bit, out of balance with various commitments, so I'm happy to get another show out today.

Let me remind you that notes and a transcript are available at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by kcentricity.com. Well, I thank you again for listening, and I hope you'll join us next time.

References

Alex White, The Elements of Graphic Design, Allworth Press, 2002

Design Guy, Episode 27, Asymmetrical or Informal Balance

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Sat, 24 May 2008 07:11:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Now these days we've taken up the principle of Balance. And having established the concept of optical weight, and the way our page becomes a kind of balancing beam as we add visual elements to it, we turned our attention to the idea of Formal or Symmetrical balance. And we described this as a mirror image type of arrangement, where elements are symmetrically balanced on a page with respect to its central axis. And wee also pointed the implications of formal balance, the effect achieved by symmetry. Which is a feeling of equilibrium, and a sense of stasis and stability. And if I'm recapping too many concepts, too quickly, just take some time to listen to the previous programs, where I explain each idea in turn.

But moving on from there, the next concept we need to identify is Asymmetrical Balance, also called Informal Balance. And the typical example of this kind of balance is when one large element is counterbalanced by several smaller objects. Or if you'll recall the role of value that we described, we may have a situation where a smaller, dark object, is counterbalanced by a larger, light-colored object. At first glance, we might think these kinds of compositions aren't balanced, because they don't have the obvious symmetry that makes the situation feel all the more stable. But on closer examination, we realize that the teeter totter of our page is balanced, after all. And though the objects distributed on either side of the central axis may be very different from each other, the optical weight of each side appears to be about even.

An even more clever example of assymetrical balance is when a large object on one side of the page is balanced by a smaller object placed at the very far end of the opposite side, mimicking the physics of leverage.

But, as we explained last time, the visual designer is usually more concerned with the effects or implications of the type of balance being employed. And where we said last time that Formal balance imparts a conservative and a stable feeling to a composition, Informal balance, on the other hand, with its lack of symmetry, achieves quite the opposite. In fact, the effect is what I'd call a dynamic sense of order. And that's because there are differences in the page. While it feels resolved in terms of balance, it isn't equalized, the way water seeks its own level. And in that sense it's unresolved, but in a good way. It's got a dynamism, and so informal balance implies movement.

So, look around. Pay attention to compositions in ads and books and magazines. And you'll see what I mean. Those ads for Absolut Vodka, with their perfectly centered single bottle, and the perfectly centered caption are always symetrical and formally balanced. And that stable feeling we infer from those layouts is a good thing, because that bottle has never once appeared to be in danger of tipping over and spilling its contents in all the years that we've been seeing it. Then scout around some more and you'll typically see many more examples of informal balance, and while the pages feel stable enough, you'll notice the dynamism I'm talking about. They almost seem to move, they're dynamic. And you'll notice, that these layouts generally tend to be less staid and formal and conservative feeling.

Now, as a final note on this formal versus informal balance thing, I just want to be clear that my intent is not to pit one against the other, as if one is superior to the other. The decision to choose one over the other is often an intuitive one, but where we're very aware of our thought process, the decision should be based on suitability. It's about what kind of feeling we want to convey in the composition itself.

It's interesting to note that Jan Tschichold(1), one of the titans of typographic design, was the author of a landmark book titled, The New Typography, back in the 20s. And this was a modernist manifesto that, among other things, argued for the superiority of informal balance. And like many of the schools of thought that emerge throughout design history, this was like a declaration. These movements would come along like a revolution and the message was, forget everything you know, throw it all away - it's wrong, this is how it should be done. And the irony is that Mr. Tschichold later recanted the rigidity of his own writings, and made friends with traditional things like roman typefaces and formal balance.

Today, we seem to be largely over this polarization. We've learned from the schools of thoughts and we tens to regard them as different modes of expression to choose from. So, as far as balance is concerned, exercise your formal and informal sensibilities as suits the particular needs of your project.

But that'll do for today. I want to thank you for listening in, and I'll remind you that a transcript of today's show is available at the webpage, which is designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by kcentricity.com

But thanks again for joining us, and I hope to have you back next time.

References

1. http://www.linotype.com/794/inhonorofthe100thbirthdayofjantschichold.html

Design Guy, Episode 26, Symmetrical or Formal Balance

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:20:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

In our last episode, we took up the principle of balance. And to lay the ground work for this discussion, we introduced the phrase, optical weight, which, in a nutshell, describes the phenomenon of how elements on a page have visual gravity. Depending on their size, and depending on their value, which refers to their lightness or darkness, an element can appear relatively light or heavy. And in the balancing beam that is our page, this influences our perceptual sense of balance.

Today, I'd like to introduce the idea, first, of Symmetrical Balance, also referred to as Formal Balance. And as the name implies, this kind of balance has an even symmetry, or mirror image distrubution of elements on the page with relation to the central axis. So, like the appearance of a butterfly, or a rorschak test folded perfectly in half, we often have a perfect parity, and close left hand / right hand shape equivalence. Now, this doesn't mean that we necessarily have identical objects on either side of that central axis, but we've got similarity in terms of numbers and sizes and value of objects, and they're more or less arranged in mirror-image fashion.

The simplest example of this is the center justfication of type. When we center-justify type on a page, we clearly see that mirror-image shape occurring. In other words, whether the measure of a line of type is long or short, their position will correspond to a central axis. So, if we squint at a page of justified type, we'll discern a grayish mass with identical contours on each side. Kind of like a rorschak shape. So, here we have an example of type brought into formal balance.

Now, the more thoughtful typographers employ formal balance with purpose in mind. They have a reason for doing so. But to understand that purpose, one has to appreciate some of the implications of formal balance.

If we take wedding invitations, for example, it seems that they're always center justified, which tends to befit these very formal, somewhat decorative documents. And because they are center-justified, or formally balanced, we get kind of a tranquil, sedate effect out of it. Formal balance just feels safe and stable to us. And the reason it does, the idea behind it, is that everything is equal, everything is in an equilibrium. And what that implies to us is a static state. There's no movement implied by stasis or equilibrium. Like a pyramid, its a stable form. And, yet, if you think about it, it's not always exciting to play it safe. Things that are static, in a state of equilibrium, with no implied motion, can become quite boring, actually. So, when it comes to layout decisions, we'll want to reserve symmetrical or Formal balance for material that's suited to this type of arrangement. Ofttimes, that will make sense for conservative kinds of things.

Formal balance is often where we start as beginners at design. Because it just feels safer for us to balance elements in this manner, we tend to use it more when we're starting out. We do what a friend of mine calls "the matchy matchy thing," out of insecurity, balancing elements on the right and left sides of the page, because, well, we're afraid to do otherwise. Our instincts haven't been trained to create more dynamic arrangements, because we're insecure about venturing away from our symmetry.

But more on that next time. We'll stop here for now, with the definition and implications of formal balance as we've just described, and venture into some other ideas about balance next time.

But I thank you again for listening. And I want to especially thank the good folks at Apple for featuring this program on their iTunes Store podcast home page last week. That was a wonderful surprise.

And if you're enjoying these shows, I'd ask you to leave a comment at the podcast home page at iTunes, which is the best way to get the word out.

But thanks again for tuning in, and I hope to have you back again.

Design Guy, Episode 25, Balancing Act

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Thu, 8 May 2008 15:55:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explore timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Well, we may not be able to bring balance to the force, but we can speak to the principles of balance that will help us in our design work. In life, as in many arenas, balance is something we're always striving for. In our compositions, designers have the unique advantage of seeing balance, and of actually visualizing its dynamics. And yet despite that advantage, designers still need help with balance, they need help with how to think about balance, and so this is a topic that's worthy of our time and attention.

But let's start with a basic definition. The standard dictionary entry describes balance as an even distribution of weight, allowing a person or thing to remain upright and stable. When something is stable, it tends not to fall over. When a person loses their balance, it's because their weight has shifted in a way that won't allow them to maintain their stance. And so we begin to fall over, and if we can't recover, we take a tumble. The greater the shift in weight, the less chance we have of regaining our balance. So, balance is something we're constantly trying to maintain, even on an unconscious level, as we stroll down the avenue on a carefree, sunny day.

And so it goes with our design compositions. The balance we maintain is often something we're not even consciously thinking of. We just make the adjustments to our layouts as we go, intuitively, without much thought or concern.

And yet balance merits a bit of study, especially when we're starting out, and are forming our habits of thought and approach to our work. So, what I'd like to do is discuss the different kinds of balance, and their implications on our work.

Now, with that definition of balance as an even distribution of weight, or weights, we've got a pretty good leg up on things. In fact, I've heard designers compare the weight and balance aspects of their compositions to a teeter totter kind of dynamic, recognizing that as they place elements on a page, each element has its own optical weight. And by the way, do make mental note of that phrase, "optical weight," because it's a good concept to have in mind as we approach other subjects of design. But in balancing the page, we know we've got a central axis, a conceptual line down the middle of the page. And as elements stack up in various places on the page, our sense of balance is affected. Our page will fee like it's see sawing to the right or left if the weight of those elements is distributed unevenly.

So, what contributes to optical weight? That is, what makes an element feel relatively light or heavy on the page? The main contributors are size or scale, and value. The bigger the object, the heavier. The darker the object, the heavier.

For example, picture a page in your mind with two black orbs, two filled-in circles of black. And these orbs are distributed evenly, horizontally on the either side of the central axis of your page. So, we've got a classic teeter totter set-up here. Well, if they're both the same size, and they're both black, how will that feel? Balanced or unbalanced? I think if we'd all say they're balanced.
Now, make one smaller than the other. And it feels unbalanced.
Now, make them equal in size again, but change one to light grey, which is a lower value or tint. Now the page feels unbalanced again. Same size orbs, but one is lighter in value, and it feels lighter in weight.
Finally, reduce the black orb to half the size of the light grey orb, or thereabouts. This tends to bring things back in balance. One side is smaller but denser looking, the other larger, but lighter looking, and so they appear to be essentially balanced.

Now, there's much more to balance to explore, but that'll have to do for today, so let's stop here, with this teeter totter concept and the idea of optical weight under our belts.

And let me remind you that a transcript of today's discussion is available on my webpage, at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by kcentricity.com.

Well, I thank you again for listening in, and I hope to have you back next time.

Design Guy, Episode 24, Elements: Format, The Forgotten Element

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:13:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Today, we bring to a close our series on the formal elements of two dimensional design. Having surveyed line, shape, value, color, and texture, today we'll wrap up our discussion with some thoughts on format.

And what is format? To lay out a definition, Format refers to the shape and size and dimensions associated with our chosen medium. Specifically, that could be a business card or a book jacket or a label for a can of beans. All these are examples of formats, each with their own possibilities and challenges and constraints. And every one of these formats deserves thoughtful consideration before we set to work.

Unfortunately, however, Format is the forgotten element. Or if that's too dramatic a statement, we might at least agree that it's frequently the overlooked element. Like the phenomenon of something that's hidden in plain sight, format isn't always given the consideration it deserves.

This syndrome reminds me of one of those classic monster movie scenes where someone is being told where to look for the creature's footprint, but they just can't see it. "Where? Where is it?," they ask. And it's not until the camera pulls back, creating a wide reveal, that we, the audience, can see that they're actually standing in it. The footprint is enormous--the work of Godzilla or King Kong.

And this is why we overlook format. It's our context. And we tend to miss it or to take it for granted. And what we tend to do, is to default to the tired, conventional uses of certain formats, without giving it a whole lot of thought.

Robin Landa, in her book, Graphic Design Solutions, says it this way.

"Whether it is a page or a business card, whatever you start out with is the format. The format is a vital element in two dimensional design. Most beginning students take the format for granted, not realizing that it is an active element in design. If you think of an average page as two vertical lines and two horizontal lines joined at right angles, then the first line you draw on a page is actually the fifth line. Like that fifth line, all of the other formal elements are contained by, and interact with, the original shape of the format." (end of quotation).

So, Landa is emphasizing format as an active element that should be given as much strategic thought as we would give any other element.

There are some classic examples of how designers overlook format. Thinking of a business card only in horizontal terms, for example, as if it can't be turned vertically. Or assuming there's only one fold scheme possible for brochures, the tri-fold that everyone else uses. Even formats that offer tremendous flexibility go unexploited. The format of a book, its shape and size, its orientation and thickness, is determined by the choice of trim dimensions and paper, well within the power of a designer to influence. Now, I know there are other constraining factors, such as budget and trade standards that tend to tie our hands. But just as often, what holds us back is simply a failure of imagination. We tend to go with the flow, and we default to convention.

These examples are offered not as an attempt to turn this discussion into some kind of a call to novelty, but simply to provoke a little forethought. If we stop and ponder the possibilities of our format, we stand to improve all the decisions that will follow.

Finally, we should be aware of the function of our format. Where street signs and billboards are meant to be viewed from afar, magazines and brochures are viewed at close range. And then there's the nuance of how to optimize a format for its intended use. Should that cookbook we're supposed to design be perfect-bound? Or should we put it in a ring binder, so that it lays flat, and so the reader can remove or add pages? Or how about that web page, should we use a tabbed format for its navigation, or will some other metaphor better suit our audience. It should become obvious through these examples that choice of format has many practical implications. And that its the designer's job to aid the consumption of information by selecting the right format and using it in the right way.

The old design adage, "form follows function" attests to this. Let's first determine the function of what we're doing. If we can figure out the function, we can usually draw natural and obvious conclusions about the form, or format.

But that's it for today. If you'd like a transcript of today's discussion, be sure to visit the webpage at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com.

Thanks again for listening. And I hope you'll join us next time.

References

Robin Landa, Graphic Design Solutions, 3rd Edit, Cengage, 2005

Design Guy, Episode 23, Elements: Smooth Moves with Texture

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Mon, 7 Apr 2008 14:10:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply. Or as Emerson once exhorted, "If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles, you can devise your own methods." If we update that advice for today, we might say to designer, "Learn how design works, don't just learn software applications."

We're talking about the formal elements of two dimensional design, which are the building blocks that we use to compose our work. And today we turn our attention to texture.

Texture is a bit more sensual than the other elements, because in addition to the visual qualities or the surface appearance we portray in our work - which looks like a relative smoothness or roughness - texture is also a tactile phenomenon. It's something we feel and, in some cases, literally touch, like when we select gloss or matte lamination for an annual report. This is a case where someone will see it and respond to the textural elements, but they'll also hold it. They'll feel the weight of the paper and they'll feel the tactile qualities of the stock we've chosen, as well as any special treatments, like lamination.

Robin Landa, in her book, Graphic Design Solutions, says it this way:
She says, "Sometimes you decide just by looking at a texture whether or not you want to touch it. Some textures are appealing, like velvet, while others, like rust, are not. In art, there are two categories of texture - tactile and visual. Tactile textures are real, we can actually feel their surfaces with our fingers. Visual textures are illusionary; they simply give the impression of real textures." (end of quotation).

But texture comes in a number of forms. And we express texture in a variety of ways. We describe it using words like hard or rough or coarse or craggy. Or we use terms like smooth or velvety or even warm or cold or soft. In other words, all surfaces have a texture. And it's up to you as the designer to recognize texture, and decide how you'll incorporate it as an element in your composition, and do so for the right reasons.

Will it play a minor, supporting role? Or will texture be the dominant and central idea? Maybe you're going with a corrugated cardboard look and feel, along with typography that looks hand-markered, and its the strong texture aspect of the composition that achieves the intentionally crude feeling that you're after. On the other hand, you may be creating a very spartan, sophisticated piece with lots of white space and a tight grid, and a relative absence of texture. You'll probably be staying away from a rough-hewn, organic feeling, in favor of a smoother appearance. Maybe you'll want to use a combination of textures, a contrast in textures, knowing that rough looks rougher and smooth looks smoother when you play them against each other.

One way of the other, you need to make decisions as a designer. You need to consider various options in texture as part of your lexicon and vocabulary, and choose what you want to communicate, in the same way that, in the verbal realm, you would choose the right words. In fact, we use the terminology of texture to describe verbal language all the time. For example, we engage in "rough" language or we use "course" words. Other times, we describe someone as a "smooth" talker, a politician perhaps, or that their words were "slick". So, it's really interesting how these ideas carry over. But it does reinforce the idea that designers should choose texture strategically to convey and support meaning.

So, give careful consideration to texture as you plan the communication aspect of what you're doing. Plan it in the visual realm, as you use visual elements that only have the appearance of texure. And, if you're creating tangible products, like printed pieces, give thought to how you'll create actual, tactile texture, by virtue of the kind of papers you'll use, and the treatments that will actually be touched and felt by the end user. We use the phrase, "look and feel" all the time, even in web design. But texture is truly the "feel' part. So, ask yourself what you want to say, what tone should come across, and how texture can support those concerns, and your work will be looking and feeling just the way they should.

Well, that's it for now. I want to thank you for listening.

And I'll ask that if you've been enjoying this ongoing series, please consider dropping a comment at iTunes or podcast alley to show your support, which is really just a great way to get the word out. And I thank you in advance for doing so.

And, until next time. Thanks again for listening!

References

Robin Landa, Graphic Design Solutions, 3rd Edit, Cengage, 2005

Design Guy, Episode 22, Elements: Value-Added Design

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:12:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

We're talking about the formal elements of two-dimensional design. And these are the building block elements, the fundamentals at work in our design compositions. So far among these elements we've identified Line and Shape and Color.

And with the last discussion of color fresh in our memories, today we'll consider Value. And Value simply describes the relative lightness or darkness within a composition.

A good way for us to see Value at work is to conjure up in minds an image of a color wheel. In fact, imagine you're in a room with a poster of the color wheel on one of the walls. And it's your garden variety color wheel that we're all familiar with. Sort of a pie chart, with seven wedges that follow the Roy-G-Biv arrangement, each wedge its own color.

Then imagine you've got your hand on a dimmer switch and you can make the room dim, and the color wheel dim,... and then dim them even more until the colors are pretty dark,... and then darker still until everything is black or near-black on that poster.

Then, alternatively, you can bring that dimmer switch up to make the room bright,... and brighter still,... in fact these lightbulbs can get so bright that we can hardly look after a while, everything is just awash in white, including the colors on the chart.

Now this example of playing with a dimmer switch (and I can still hear my Mom telling me to cut it out, by the way) is a study in Value, or how we can play with Value. When we turned up the light, we added white to the colors, and this had the effect of turning blue into light blue, and red into pink. And it's really just like adding white to your paints when you want to turn full strength colors into pastels. Sort of that Martha Stewart or Easter pallette. And this kind of change in value, adding whites, is called TINT. But, when we dimmed those colors, which is like mixing increased amounts of black to your color, we manipulated SHADE. So Tint and Shade are couple of key terms that have to do with Value. And it's all a result of light.

And that's really key, that concept of how light interplays with color, because value describes the effect of a light source as it creates shadows and highlights in our subject.

Now when graphic designers think of Value we're usually thinking in terms of contrast. And that's because designers are obsessed with contrast. Or at least we should be if we're not. And we'll speak more about contrast in a future episode.

But in a nutshell, when adjust value, we adjust our composition. We manipulate how we perceive the elements on the page. We want some to be dominant, perhaps a strong foreground element, a bold book title is made darker in value, perhaps, which would be an adjustment to Shade. Or we want other things to recede, we want them to move away, into the perceptual background, much the way a painter adds whites to distant landscape elements, which is a TINT adjustment, in order to push them back.

Sometimes we're just changing the overall mood. The same palette of hues we've chosen just "feels" different depending on whether we use their darker or lighter equivalents. And this is why interior decorators advise you to hang up a swatch of color so you can observe it over time, as the light in your house changes during the course of a day, and then decide if you like it.

Other times, changes to value creates special effects. The humble gradient blend is perennially-popular for creating a sense of dynamic lighting. Or if we've got a multiplicity of objects, a line of dots ranging from light grey to black, for example, they almost seem to move, like a ball moving across the page. Or maybe we want to establish a pattern of dots and then break it by making just one of them a different value. Suddenly that one dot stands out as unique, drawing the eye.

Well, these are just a few examples of how we can be thinking of value and using it in our compositions.

But that's all we have time for today. If you'd like a transcript of today's program, visit the webpage at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by kcentricity.com.

Well, I thank you again for listening in and I hope to have you back again.

Design Guy, Episode 21, Elements: The Color of Design

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:01:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

We're talking about the Formal Elements, which we've defined as the building blocks of two dimensional design.

To that end, we've touched on Line and Shape so far, and just enough to convey their importance without getting too in-depth or technical. And I'd like to do the same today with Color.

Now, Color is a pretty broad topic. We could speak about it at length for many episodes, and the temptation is to get technical. And there IS a ton of information we ought to know about color. For starters, we hear about additive and subtractive color. And then there's the issue of color management. Or we hear about proprietary tools like the Pantone Matching system. And then there're those color models that we've heard of since Kintergarten, the color wheels that help us identify color relationships. We use terms like primary, secondary colors, complimentary, split-complimentary, analogous, to name some. And of course, there are what you might call the anatomical aspects of color - hue and saturation, etc. All these things and more really are essential to your education as a designer. And hopefully we'll have opportunity to explore many of these aspects in the future. And these give you the technical foundation you need to deploy color successfully in your projects.

But today I want to offer some basic thoughts on how we should think about color. And this has more to do with communication than anything else. Because, in the final analysis, designers use color to convey meaning, whether that's through obvious color symbolism or more subliminally, in order to strike a mood.

Color specialist Leatrice Eiseman says it this way.

She says, "Figure out the thing that color does. Being the complicated creatures that we are, our reactions go well beyond the physical phenomena (of color)....(they go to) the psychological response. If lavender appears lighter than purple, it is purely a sensory occurrence. It is simply what we see. But if lavender suggests a feeling of nostalgia or romance, then psychological reactions are brought into play." (1)
(end of quotation)

So the big idea is that we associate color with certain things. And as a result, we REACT to color. We RESPOND to color. For example, we speak in terms of color temperature. There are warm colors and there are cool colors. And there's a host of inbetween states, where warm and cool colors mix, and the "meaning" gets more nuanced and subtle. But we react to all these colors. They impact us .

And we may have our own personal feelings about certain colors. But the designer's job (usually) is to set aside our individual feelings and preferences for color, and play to general percpetions. For example, Green often stands for the growth and vitality we associate with vegetation, and so we can play to that perception when appropriate. I recently had some involvement in the development of a corporate logo where green was employed to mean "environmentally friendly," a popular cliche I wanted to resist at first, because it is such a cliche, and because I think people can grow cynical about such cliches, but it became inescapable in the end. It was too central to the message this corporate mark needed to embody.

Now, as designers, our typical use of color is through our software apps. In these applications, we label them with pantone or hexidecimal or rgb values. Not very.... emotionally charging. And that's a potential problem for us. Because they're just numbers. They're abstract. And this could have a sterilizing effect.

But there's a wonderful antidote for this. There's a way to emotionally charge those colors again. And that's to put descriptive names on colors. My favorite way of doing so is to spend a little time over by the paint swatches in a place like Lowe's or Home Depot. Here you'll find wonderfully evocative names for color. Names designed to stir up emotion, not just paint. A certain shade of green isn't called green, it's called Wasabi, which puts me in mind of the last time I had Sushi. Or a certain blue is called Ocean Whisper. Or a soft brown is called "Wicker" or "Sataki." You get the idea. If you think about it, we were first acquainted with such associations when we were just tikes, with our boxes of Crayolas, where discovered names for colors like "burnt sienna."

The best thing I've read on color, lately, comes from a book I have, published by Pottery Barn, of all places. It's called "Bathrooms: Ideas and Inspiration for Stylish Bathing Spaces." And they've got a section on color, in which they say the following:

"Color is a science and an art. In simple terms, the science of color has to with light while the art of color revolves around pigment. But the art of color also deals with chemistry - the chemistry of emotion. It's a pleasure to find the different combinations of hues that create a happy visual experience and express your own color point of view.... To choose colors for your bathroom, simply look at what you love and what you love to live with." (end of quotation) (2)

I like this quotation because it reminds me that, in a real sense, designers are creating places, we're creating experiences. And that we can use color to push all the appropriate emotional buttons in our audience. And in this way, color is strategic. It's yet another example of that analogy of the opening moves in a chess game.

So, to summarize. It's important that we gain technical knowledge about color, but ultimately, this knowledge should serve the goal that Leatrice Eiseman identified. Which is to figure out the thing that color does. Figure out how you want to impact your audience. And then choose colors that will cause the desired effect.

But's that's all for today. Thanks again for listening in. If you'd like a transcript of the show, visit the webpage at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com

I thank you again for listening, and I hope to have you back again.

References

1. Eiseman contributes a short chapter on color to Hillman Curtis' MTIV: Making the Invisible Invisible: Principles, Practice and Inspiration for the New Media Designer.

2. Oxmoor House, 2003, Pottery Barn Bathrooms

Design Guy, Episode 20, Elements: Things Are Shaping Up Nicely

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Tue, 4 Mar 2008 15:23:00 -0800

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

We're talking about the Formal Elements, which we previously described as the building blocks of two dimensional design.

In the last episode, we explored the idea of Point, and how Point becomes Line as we move it about the surface of our chosen medium.

Today, we'll talk about the next thing that happens in this process. Which is to suggest that these elements follow a natural order. Point begets Line, as we just said, and Line begets Shape. Shape, then, is the next thing to occur, and Shape is the element we want to explore today.

But let me review that progression with a bit more precision. We draw a line, beginning at a given point. And from that point, we wander about the page, and our line remains a line until... we bring it on home and establish a Shape. In other words, Shape happens when we complete our circuit by connecting the end points of our line. Or we might simply say that we've outlined something. And for those of you who've logged time with drawing programs with their pen tools, this outlining process is very familiar. Graphic designers routinely create shapes in this way. Sometimes we take a photo, of a leaf perhaps, then trace its contours in order to capture just its shape. This is a common task, a common process that consists of Point, line, and shape.

The textbooks classify shapes in three ways.

Geometric Shapes - these are shapes made out of triangles or squares or circles or other geometric forms, and they look mechanical, in that they lack a hand drawn appearance. They're the product of tools like rulers and protractors.

Organic Shapes are more free-flowing, as opposed to geometric, but they still look mechanically produced in that they lack brush strokes or other artifacts of the media used.

Then there are Calligraphic Shapes. And as the word calligraphy implies, it refers to shapes that are drawn, where we ARE aware of the artist's hand, and the line quality of the instrument used, including the characteristics of the medium, like the toothy paper that lends texture to pencil lines.

So, in a nutshell, this choice of geometric, organic, or calligraphic shapes describes different modes of expression.

But what I really want to convey today is the primacy of shape. Shape is most important among the elements, visually and perceptually, because of the way our mind seizes upon shapes, the way our mind demands shapes in order to make sense of the environment. And this trait owes itself to the way the brain is wired. Many have suggested that it's simply a survival thing. For eons, we needed to scan our field of vision, we needed to perceive the shape of a lion before it pounced - our keen shape perception gave us a fighting chance to run away.

In the modern world, we're very concerned with shape-symbolism. Take road signs, for example. We're in our car, and that stop sign we're approaching on the corner of Maple and Main is first and foremost an octagon, and even though it's getting dusky out, and its harshly back-lit by the sun, obliterating any sense of its color or printed content, we can at least perceive its shape, which, in the idiom of regulated travel, aka the "rules of the road," we take to mean "Stop." So, the shape, itself, provided the meaning. And so it goes as we look for the universal symbols that are sprinkled everywhere, as we do our wayfinding in public places. People the world over have been trained to look for the men's or ladies room, or the airport, by using these familiar, iconic shape symbols.

And we've all got obsessive compulsive disorder when it comes to shape recognition because our minds don't tolerate shape ambiguity well. We tend to want to know what we're looking at, which is probably why modern art doesn't cater to mainstream tastes. This is because our minds crave meaning.

And the idea that shape denotes meaning creeps into our everyday language. We say things like, "that's about the shape of it." Or we talk about "the shape of things to come" as we attempt to extract meaning from today's events and extrapolate them into tomorrow.

Our minds are so compulsive in assigning meaning to shapes that we even try to make sense of random things. In other words, our minds are always designing things, always trying to create order out of chaos.

You may have had the experience of lying on a beach, and in a very relaxed manner, studying the clouds above. And, before long, your attention was drawn to the features of a particular cloud - its contours and shadows - which seemed to create certain forms. And you noticed that these contours drew the vague shape of something recognizable. And you allowed your mind to play with it a while, until the impression of that thing became more and more distinct. Maybe you could discern the shape of a sheep, or an elephant, or the head of Elvis wearing sunglasses. And perhaps you rolled over for twenty minutes or so before turning back over. And even though the clouds continued to morph during that interval, you could still see Elvis, sort of a smudge by that time, and you could see his sunglasses, smeared and elongated, but still recognizable. This is an example of our how our minds make meaning from even meaningless shapes. It's a cognitive imperative, this meaning-making. And it helps to explain why people pay tidy sums for old grilled cheese sandwhiches on eBay that purport to contain the visage of the virgin Mary. And it's all about shape recognition.

Now those are really awful examples used just to make the point that our brains latch on to shapes. For a better example, think of the classic logos, the famous and enduring marks of the great companies that are branded in our minds. You can reduce those shapes to just one color, like a silhouette, and they remain eminently recognizable. They still retain their meaning. They still communicate. But, I think the ultimate example for graphic designers is that of type. And what is a specimen of type, but a letterform? Letterforms are the graphic shapes that produce words, the ultimate meaning-makers. And we take these shapes for granted even as absorb untold numbers of words in the course of our lives, informing and guiding our very existence by them.

So designers, remember that Shape is powerful and that Shape ought to be primary in your arsenal. And that if you make shapes, you'll make meaning, and if you make meaning, you'll truly be communicating.

But that's all for today. Thanks again for listening in. If you'd like a transcript of the show, visit the webpage at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com

I thank you again for listening, and I hope to have you back again.

Design Guy, Episode 19, Elements: What's the Point of Line?

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:25:00 -0800

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

As I've mentioned before, our focus here is on principles, rather than software tips or industry events. Not that there's anything wrong with those things - we all need to keep up. But it's the principles you can depend upon as your constants - principles act as footholds in a world of rapid change. And once grounded in them, you'll probably even save yourself a bit of money and effort as the siren song of new software upgrades loses some of its allure. You may find you can skip a version or two before upgrading to the next big thing, because you begin to realize that new features aren't everything. It's better to invest your attention toward principles, and learn how to wield the tools you've got, than misplace your investment in mere features.

But we're talking about the formal elements of design these days, and in the last program we started things off with some introductory thoughts. To highlight one point, we said that the formal elements are the basic building blocks of design. And just like the opening moves of a chess game, we should think of them as strategic, because we'll use them to frame things and set up things to follow as we build our design.

Now, the first of these elements is Line, which German artist, Maholy Nage,(1) described as the "record of a path of motion."

This idea comes in clearer when we recognize the basis of Line, which is the concept of Point. Point is what we make our line with. Or to say it another way, line is what results when we start moving a point around the surface of our medium. And Point is simply the tool we've chosen: the pencil's point, or the tip of a brush, or the tool with which we're painting pixels on screen.

So, Line is the expression or movement of that point. And as we move that point, our resulting lines can be straight or angular or curvilinear. They can very perfect in their straightness - the product of a machine - or they can imply the human and organic movement of the hand.

And this brings up the idea of Line Quality. Line quality refers to the physical attributes or properties of a line. The feeling we get by the nature of the line we're making. Some lines are wavy and broken, as if an old man with tremors made them. Some lines are thin, others thick, still others go thick and thin, like one exerting pressure on a wet brush.

And, again, because line can be defined as the path that our point took, line strongly connotes direction. Horizontals, Verticals, and Diagonals, are all descriptions of direction.

And don't just think of the artist's medium. The subjects in photographs contain all kinds of edges and contours - the equivalent of line.

Lines can give the illusion of motion, and even suggest the abstract notion of a larger context, as they drift right off the edge of the page. I've always been fascinated with paintings or designs where the motion of a line seems frozen in time. Where you clearly see movement captured, where a line contains the artifacts or impressions of bristles or pastels or whatever instrument the artist used. And in the path the instrument took, you see the illusion of motion. You've got a paradox in that a static design appears to move.

Lines can enclose and encircle, they can be open, they can manipulate our perception of the space they define. Converging lines can put us in mind of railroad tracks meeting at the horizon, far far away. They can suggest form and mass, like Saul Bass's(2) original AT&T logo(3) does.

All these things and more are achieved by Line. So do give it a second thought the next time you pick up your mouse or your graphics tablet pen or better yet, your No. 2 Ticonderoga brand pencil. And be sure to sharpen up that point.

But that'll do for today. I want to thank you again for listening and remind you that a transcript of today's talk can be found at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com.

And if you're enjoying this series, I'll ask that you consider leaving your comments at my iTunes page, or cast your vote at podcast alley. And I do thank you in advance, those remarks are very much appreciated.

Well, until next time, this is Design Guy. Hope to have you back again.

References

1. http://art.sdsu.edu/geninfo/homepages/art157/projects/elements.html#line

2. http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalist-saulbass

3. http://www.areaofdesign.com/americanicons/bass.htm (Scroll down for the AT&T logo.)

Design Guy, Episode 18, The Formal Elements of Design: A Foreword

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:55:00 -0800

Download Episode 18

Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Well, it's high time we spoke about the basic elements of 2-dimensional design, the so-called formal elements.

But before we get into specifics, we should be aware of a general principle. And that's that there's power in simply being able to name things. In any arena, there's an authority we gain merely by learning the names and faces, the do's and don'ts, the rules of the road, etc. And in the self-same way we study vocabulary and grammar in the realm of writing, there's power for the designer in being able to name and properly use the elements of design.

Particularly in visual design, because so much of what we do is kind of invisible to us, even as we're working, because we're running along intuitively and not necessarily consciously thinking about the principles that underly what we're doing. We just do it. And that's fine and actually desirable because it means we've internalized what we've learned. We've got the principles inside of us. Like learning to ride a bike, we want to get to a place where we no longer have to think, "left foot, right foot, balance, apply brake." We want to achieve what learning theorists call "automatic mastery" because it liberates us from the stymying effects of having to think too much.

Now, this intuitive mode of working serves us just fine most of the time. But sooner or later we get into unfamiliar territory. We become unsure of ourselves. Something we're working on takes a weird turn and we find ourselves at a loss to diagnose it. And it's unsettling for us to know that something's wrong, yet feel ill-equipped to fix it. If only we could put our finger on what's wrong, we could get ourselves unstuck. This is why it's helpful to name the elements, and remind ourselves how the work. It's a way of getting ourselves out of jam, just by talking ourselves through the problem.

Now, the maddening thing about this whole subject area of the formal elements of design is that no one seems to be able to agree exactly as to what constitutes them. You hear different things referenced by different people. Be that as it may, we'll cover the more commonly cited list of elements, which makes up just a handful of things, and use this as a springboard into a longer litany of the elements, principles, and concepts that will stretch across the many episodes to come.

As we begin to get familiarized with them, a helpful way of thinking about them is as a set of sliders or controls. Controls that, conceptually speaking, are not unlike the ones found on a music mixer. You know, the big boards with all the panning knobs and LED lights that allow for precise control of a musical mix. Need more cow bell? Let's push that slider up a bit.

Insert audio clip of Christopher Walken's "Cowbell" sketch on SNL:
<<<"I got a fever, and there's only one cure. More cow bell">>>

But that's the idea, we want to be able to name and understand the elements that influence our design work. So, what are these elements? Robin Landa, in her book, Graphic Design Solutions(1), invites us to begin thinking about them in this way. She says:

Draw a line on a page, paper or electronic. Now add another line. This seems like a simple exercise, but here are a few questions. Where did you draw the first line on the page - at the top or at the bottom? Where did you draw the second line? Were they on angles? How long were the lines? How thick were the lines? Did the lines touch? Did the lines bend or curve, or were they straight?

How can drawing two lines on a page become so complicated? If you think of the two lines as the first two moves in a chess game, you can begin to see how important each is to the outcome. As soon as you draw one line on a page, you begin to build a design.

Lines are one of the basic building blocks of design. These building blocks of two dimensional design are called the formal elements. They are line, shape, color, value, texture, and format. These elements are at the foundation of all graphic design.

(end of quotation.)

I like Landa's analogy of the first two moves of a chess game. Because it recognizes how even the seemingly little things we do, like putting a simple line on a page, can be profound in the way they frame things, and influence all of our subsequent actions. They're like the strategic decisions we make in any arena because they set up things to follow, and determine the ultimate course that we take. And, for that matter, they help us make course corrections along the way. So, keep that concept in mind in future episodes as we turn our attention to each of these elements in turn.

But that's all we've got time for today. If you'd like to remark about anything discussed today, leave me a voice message at 206-350-6748.

And as is my custom, I'll place shownotesat designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by kcentricity.com. And if you want to keep these shows coming automatically, remember to click that little subscribe button in iTunes, which will add the show to your personal podcast directory.

Until next time, I thank you for listening, and hope to have you back again.

References

1. Landa, Robin, Graphic Design Solutions, 2nd Ed., OnWord Press, 2000

Design Guy, Episode 17, Embracing Constraints

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 05:48:00 -0800

Download Episode 17

Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Now, we've spent some time trekking through that terrain known as the creative process, and on our way we've looked at a few ideas that will help us to gear up for the challenges we can expect to face as we traverse our projects. Today, we'll bring this series to an end today with some parting thoughts. But since this little excursion has been by no means exhaustive, you can expect that we'll dip into the general subject matter of creativity from time to time.

And I encourage you to continue doing your own study in this area. At my webpage, which you can find at designguyshow.blogspot.com, I've posted shownotes, which include a bibliography of all the books I've referenced during these programs. And at the end of today's talk, I'll recommend a few of the programs that I enjoy and highly recommend for real world insight into creativity.

If you've been with us from the start of the show, you'll remember that before we launched into this series, we discussed how design begins. Along those lines, we explored requirements gathering, and the discovery process that we undertake with out clients. And in those programs, I recommended that you keep your horizons broad as you prepare for the creative phase of your projects. And this provided a natural segue into the series we're wrapping up now, because the big idea is that we want to approach creative without a heightened sense of constraints pressing down on us. The early part of our project should be characterized by an open-minded brainstorming sensibility, where no idea is a bad idea. And this meanas that, at least for a little while, we can indulge ourselves in a bit of fantasy. To use a filmmaker's analogy, we can allow ourselves to think like Steven Spielberg for a while, even if we've only got a Kevin Smith budget. And this exercise in thinking big safeguards us from aiming too low on our projects, or assuming that we can't pull off great results with very little resources. And if you remember the design adage, Less is More, this makes even more sense, and should encourage us to make the most of our little projects by always thinking big.

Now, as we get deeper into the design phase, we necessarily have to allow reality to inform our open-ended brainstorming. The facts of life being what they are, we're going to have to design in a way that jibes with the resources we've got to work with. Which brings up the subject of constraints.

And what are constraints? Constraints, simply put, are limitations. Like the picket fences in our yards, constraints are the boundaries we've got to live within. The good news, though is that we navigate constraints, we adapt to constraints all the time, with minimum thought or energy expended. This holiday season, I doubt many of us will buy a 13 foot Christmas tree if we've only got an 8 foot ceiling in your living room. On New Year's Eve, we can hope that our celebration will be constrained by a personal drinking limit, so we can all drive home safely after the party.

In our projects, there are all kinds of limitations that we need to factor in. Some limitations are intuitive, and don't require much thought. Others, require detailed attention and planning. Of course, the one constraint we all face is time. There's a limit to how long we can work on our project if there's a paying customer waiting.And so, we'll likely draw up some kind of schedule to measure and mete out the time that we do have. And if we're to be profitable, we've got to stay withing a budget, so clearly there's a money limit, too.

The other broad area of constraint we must be cognizant of is that of our media. If we're print designers, there's only so many colors we can reproduce with CMYK process inks. And there's only so much quality we can expect out of uncoated papers, so maybe we should use our one-color logo for that newspaper ad.

If we're new media designers, we have to content ourselves with limited typographic control. At least for this present age of limited screen resolution, inconsistent browser support, and other limitations, we have to content ourselves with macro-typography, instead of the micro-typographic control we've enjoyed in the realm of print. Or we're going to have to compress our media assets more than we like to in order to fit them within bandwidth limits.

So, constraints are limits. Constraints confine us. Constraints are the ceilings we bump our heads on. At least, this is one way to think about constraints.

On the other hand, we can make our peace with constraints. We can look for opportunities within our limitations. In one of Hillman Curtis'(1) books on Flash design, written at the dawn of the Flash Web Design era, he speaks to the transcendant principle of embracing constraints. Rather than bemoaning the fact that you can't fit 100 lbs of design into a 10 lb. design bag, you can change your perspective. You can embrace your constraints.(2) You can look at the possibilities of your chosen format and medium and plan accordingly. And when you do this, a wonderful thing happens. You stop making the mistakes that all the hacks make. You stop trying to make your format do things it was never intended to do. You stop trying to push your medium so far that all the user sees are its weaknesses.

A timely example of this principle are the movies that attempt to recreate authentic looking human beings using CGI. The more they push for this goal, the more they risk falling into what some have coined the "uncanny valley"(3) - which is that point where 3D models look pretty human, but creepily unreal at the same time. This is an example of pushing a medium too far. Of not living withing your means, so to speak.

So, go for economy. Remember that Less is More. That you can have more impact with fewer things. Oftentimes, the more you add to your work in the way of design elements, the more you begin to dilute the piece. The more you introduce what designers refer to as "extraneous elements." But if you embrace constraints by putting 8 lbs. of design in your 10 lb. design bag, you'll have room left over. You'll have breathing room for your work so that it can live and be vital and effective. So, make friends with those limits, scale your design accordingly, and you won't have a sense of confiment anymore. You'll just have good design.

Well, as I mentioned before, we'll move on from this creativity series. But that doesn't mean our study has to end. Here are three programs that I highly recommend you subscribe and listen to, because they explore creativity in the real world, where the best and brightest tell the tale of their own journeys into creativity.

The first is KCRW's The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell (4), which focuses mainly on filmmakers and writers, and the design and thematic drivers of their projects. The second is PRI's Studio 360. (5) The third is The Accidental Creative. (6) Like this program, these shows avoid focusing exclusively on any one design discipline, but, rather, they speak to design in general, as they explore the universal and timeless aspects of design that every creative encounters.

Well, that's it for today. I want to thank you again for listening and look forward to having you back again. But before I go, I'd like to plug my new voice mail number once more, which you can use in order to add your voice to the discussion. I'd love to hear from you, and to add your recorded remarks to a future show. But you've got to make that call, at 206-350-6748. Until next time, this is Design Guy. Be well.

References

1. HillmanCurtis.com - Curtis' books are always embued with timeless principles of design. I recommend you get your hands on MTIV: Making the Invisible Invisible: Principles, Practice and Inspiration for the New Media Designer.

2. More on the philosophy and principle of embracing constraints from the folks at 37signals, one of the most innovative web application developers today. http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch03_Embrace_Constraints.php

3. http://www.slate.com/id/2102086

4. http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tt

5. http://www.pri.org/stu360.html

6. http://www.accidentalcreative.com/

Design Guy, Episode 16, The Eleventh Draft

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:35:00 -0800

Download Episode 16

Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design, and explains them simply.

We've talking about creativity in recent episodes. And, continuing this line of thought, I'd like to start today's episode with a quotation.

It's by Saul Bass, who remarked in an interview about a problem encountered by young designers and students: "They are not privy to process," he noted. "They have the illusion that these things really spring full-blown out of the head of some designer. This is a very unsettling perception for young people, because they struggle with their work. They have a go at it... They redo.... It gets better... It slips... It gets worse... it comes back ... It comes together. And maybe it's something that's pretty good, even excellent. But they say to themselves, "Gee, it comes hard and it's so difficult. Am I really suited for this?" (1) (end of quotation)

Bass is speaking to the subject we've been exploring - the ofttimes arduous journey of the creative process - and how we've got to correct our misconception that great design comes forth in a fully realized state. Let's face it, we're conditioned by an instant gratification world. So, it's understandable if we expect remarkable things to be handed to us by our minds, fully formed, as effortlessly as a Mocha Frappuccino from across the counter at Starbucks. If the creative process teaches us anything, it's that anything worthwhile takes effort. Sometimes we've got to pursue what eludes us for a while, like one chasing a dropped dollar on a windy day. We need to experience the discomfort of something being just out of reach. We need to endure setbacks before we truly advance. One step forward, two steps back.

Picasso did many versions of a painting, and destroyed many a canvas until he realized the ideal he was pursuing. Even prolific authors like Stephen King need at least a few drafts to get their work into final shape(2). Hemingway declared that the first draft of anything is garbage(3). Actually, he used a stronger word, but this is a family show, folks. Likewise, as designers we have to condition ourselves to a "draft mentality". Paul Rand produced a piece that featured an abucus(4), which he meant as a metaphor for the design process, especially the late stage, in which we go through a period of arrangement and rearrangement, shifting the beads of our design elements around continuously, doing and undoing and redoing, until things finally "settle out."

We need to train our expectations differently. We're not going to have instant gratification all the time when it comes to creativity. We'll have lots of little rewards along our path, to be sure. This is the joy of creativity. But it's rare indeed that we get the whole thing in its entirety the first time. That we bag the elephant. And for the thoughtful among us, neither will we be satisfied with our merely competent first efforts. So, just as Paul Masson would sell no wine before its time, we need to afford ourselves time, and we need to permit ourselves space in order for our project to come together. And I'm not talking about perfectionism - a syndrome that has us working far passed the point of diminishing returns. That's one extreme. I'm talking about giving yourself a break, giving yourself permission to lay down a crummy, ugly, smelly, malformed version of whatever it is you're working on. And then patiently sticking with it through the stages til it's done. This normally happens over a succession of drafts.

Now, if you'll recall our definition from an earlier episode, design is a progression from chaos to order. Of combining a number of disparate elements into an ordered unit. Puzzles like this don't get solved at a glance, unless you're some kind of savant, a Rain Man. As a rule, we need to take our work through a succession of versions or iterations until we get it right. And this teaches us that great design only looks easy. And this is what Saul Bass was getting at in that quotation. Anything great is usually a don't-try-this-at-home affair. Because you've got to be willing to fail and fail again before you succeed. When working on-screen, the undo command is your friend. Better yet, you can think of it as failing forward. You've learned what doesn't work. Edison didn't think of all those exploded light bulbs around his feet as failures, he viewed them as discoveries of the myriad ways in which a lightbulb won't work.(5)

So, excellence in any endeavor is often hard-won. But you'll also recall from an earlier episode, this doesn't have to translate into agony. We want to have fun. We need to be patient and train our expectations that we'll be traversing a number of drafts, but we should be enjoying ourselves, because creativity is the natural state for creatives. So, please discard the image of the tortured artist, and forget the furrowed brow. You'll only look constipated to your friends. And if you're really, truly creatively constipated, maybe you should leave that project alone for a while. Why work on it if you can't do it in your natural state? Or maybe you need to feed that unconscious mind a bit more before commencing again.

Adopting a draft mentality is really quite liberating because it means that, in the world of our project, every draft is a second chance to fix mistakes and get things right. We don't always get second chances in life, out there in the real world. So, we can stop beating ourselves up for being so talentless and stupid, because we're not the only ones that can't get it right the first time. If Hemingway wrote bad first drafts, and if Saul Bass complained that design is hard and difficult, then we've got every reason to cut ourselves some slack, don't you agree?

Well that'll do for today. As is my custom, I'll make shownotes available at my webpage, which is designguyshow.blogspot.com.

I also want to make you aware of my new voicemail number, where you can call and leave a message, and add your thoughts to the discussion. I'll even add your recorded message to future episodes. But you've got to give me a call at 206-350-6748.

Well, I thank you again for listening, and I hope to have you back next time.

References

Note: The title of this episode, The Eleventh Draft, comes from a wonderful book of the same title. An Amazon customer-reviewer says of this book, "The title, The Eleventh Draft, is a gentle nudge to the rest of us that God is in the revisions; that no one--not even the best (and these writers are good)--writes easily or quickly, and that the process of writing is just as meaningful as the result (even if nobody ever sees your 11th draft but you)." Get The Eleventh Draft here.

1. Robyn Marsack, Essays On Design 1: AGI's Designers of Influence, London, Booth-Clibborn Eidtions, 1997 (as referenced by Adrian Shaugnessy in How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)

2. To be precise, it's "two drafts and a polish." Read more in his excellent, On Writing, Pocket Books, 2002, available at Amazon.

3. http://www.quoteworld.org/quotes/11276

4. http://referencelibrary.blogspot.com/2007/05/abacus-by-paul-rand.html

5. "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Design Guy, Episode 15, Flow vs. Edit

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:20:00 -0800

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Flow vs. Edit

Design guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply. If you're just joining us, our motto here is "Principles First." Or to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods. But if you learn principles, you can devise your own methods." Which is why we don't spend time on specific software tips or methods. Now, there are excellent shows that cover those things, and, of course, we all need to keep up our technical knowledge up to date, but it's out of scope for this program, where are goal is to offer information that doesn't change. And that's why we emphasize the timeless principles - because can safely commit them to long term memory.

Now, we're in the midst of a series on creativity, with the most recent shows focusing on the creative mind. In the last show, we introduced the subject of left brain / right brain theory. And while scientists today have a more nuanced understanding of all of this than was popularly presented in the past, the model still stands as a good metaphor for the mental dynamics we experience in our creativity. We also pointed out some similarities to Freud's teaching about the id, ego, and superego.(1) And we melded it all together to say that there's a side of us that acts like an inner critic or adult. We can liken this to Freud's ego and superego, and we can also liken it to the logical left hemishphere. This is the analytical part of us that complements and sometimes conflicts with the creative side of us, or the inner child, as represented by the right side of the brain, or the unconscious id. I'm mixing up these overlapping theories a bit to reinforce the point that these dynamics really exist. Which is that we need to recognize that there's a left and right brain dynamic, a rational and emotional side, logic and feelings, intellect and intuition. And in the case of creativity, they've go to be coordinated rather than conflicted.

So, we said that we've got a part of us that want to run with reckless abandon and create - that inner wild child or right side of the brain. The part of us that can be very productive. And we said that we ought to just allow it to do so, as much as we can. We may generate a lot of crazy stuff that we'll need to rein in later, but at least we're laying down a lot of raw material. We're starting to manifest the raw material that our unconsious mind has been working on. And by laying it down in a frenzied rush, we're quickly giving ourselves physical material to play with and shape and structure.

Writers tend to think of this process as two modes of production. The first mode, which we've just described is called "Flow." And, like the word suggests, we allow our ideas to spill out of us for a while, so that we can get a complete, if imperfect, set of thoughts down. If we're designers, we'll be playing with type and color or other elements, until things start to take shape. If we're writers, we making a mad dash to the end of our first version of a manuscript. And since, we're unleashing that inner, crazy child, we know up front that we're going to throw down a lot of material, only to throw it out later. But, as I mentioned a couple of episodes ago in a somewhat different context, this is when we should be thinking quantity first, not quality. We've got to fill the bucket before we can skim off the cream. There will be time later to subject this material to critical thought and fix it, but for now, we can allow ourselves to let it flow, without any concern to who is going to see this hodge podge we're creating.

And this bring us to our second mode, which is "Edit". The part of us that wants to nitpick and criticize, and immediately set to fixing things is that logical, rational, analytical part of us, which we associate with the left brain. This is that super-ego, or finger wagging inner adult. This is what writers tend to think of as the inner critic or Editor. The key to productivity is knowing when to gag this inner critic. When to tell him to shut up. When to ignore him or put duct tape on his mouth or lock him up in the closet. If we can allow ourselves to be in "Flow" mode until we get a version of whatever we're working on down, then we'll supply ourselves with plenty of fodder for that inner critic to work with later. And we need this inner critic. We want to have polished work. We want to subject our early drafts to scrutiny. We want to revise our work in light of all of the design principles that we've taken the trouble to learnn about. But we need to suspend that "Edit" mode in order to get something down on the page first. Otherwise, we'll be afraid to make a move, we'll be paralyzed by the voice of that inner critic.

Now, the separation between these modes will tend to characterize your personal work habits or style of production. If you can discipline yourself to tear off a crazy first version before going in to edit mode, you may tend to finish faster. If you revert between flow and edit very rapidly, you'll tend to go slower. The writer, Dean Koontz,(2) admits to being one of those writers who has to perfect one sentence, one paragraph, one page at a time, before moving on to the next. He doesn't revisit those pages much, because he's done. He's flowed and edited almost simultaneously. They're not really distinct and separate modes to someone like this. Other writers and creatives tend to be able to get that wild, unruly draft down without a lot of interruption from the inner critic, and then fix it in later passes. In my own experience, I find that my habits change depending on the nature of the project and mood. But I do find it helpful to be aware of this left brain / right brain model, this flow and edit model, because I can remind myself to work a little less inhibited for a while, knowing I can fix it later. And with this awareness of flow versus edit in mind, I hope you'll be helped also, as you strategically muzzle your inner critic and let the ideas flow.

Well that'll do for today. As usual, I'll have show notes at my webpage, which is located at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by kcentricity.com. I thank you again for tuning in, and hope to have back next time.

References

1. http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/personalityelem.htm

2. http://www.deankoontz.com/

Design Guy, Episode 14, The Mind at Odds

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:30:00 -0800

Download Episode 14

Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

We're talking about the creative process. The last couple of shows, we gave attention to the creative mind. We spoke about the mental patnership of our conscious and unconscious levels of awareness, and also about the priority of loosening up and having fun. Along these lines, we reasoned that if creativity is the mind at play with materials it loves, then we need to seek out ways to have fun. First, as a means of conditioning ours minds for idea-production, and, second, as a way to noodle around and to sandbox our project and uncover possibilities. Creative play allows us to wrap our heads around the subject matter and continue to feed those mental partners.

Today, we'll speak some more about the creative mind by introducing some related concepts.

Now, most of us have heard at least a little bit about the whole left brain vs. right brain thing. This is a theory or model that says that there are differences in cognition between the left and right hemispheres of our brains. And, in fact, there is a physical separation, called the longitudinal fissure, if we must know, which creates two hemispheres, joined together by the corpus callosum. And this accounts for that walnut-like appearance, where we plainly see two halves making up the whole. And while they're physically very similar in appearance, ostensibly just mirror images of each other, they've actually got some distinct functions. And so we've come to associate the hemishperes with different mental tasks. This is called lateralization. And it tells us that mental tasks are not shared equally, but that they're handled by one hemisphere or the other, whereas others appear to be bi-lateral, or a shared.

But in keeping with the broad statements that have influenced creative theory, the left brain is said to be adept at logical, linear, analytical tasks, while the right brain is the hemisphere of creativity, intuition, the ability to discern shapes and patterns, among other things. When this mind model first came to the fore, it immediately became popular with creativity theorists because it seemed to provide a scientific explanation for the problems that artists and other creatives encounter. Popular books, like Betty Edwards's Drawing on The Right Side of the Brain, are good examples of teaching that's latched on to this concept, promising us methods to harness the hemispheres and control creativity.

It's safe to say that early presentations of the model are now considered somewhat quaint or overly broad in their simplicity and have since been updated with more nuanced explanations. But the basic idea is not in dispute.There are differences between the hemispheres. We know this from research and from brain scans and the study of stroke victims, and the like. So, for creatives, it's still useful to think in terms of left brain / right brain, at least as a helpful metaphor. It's a model that reminds us that there are complementary parts of our mind that we've got to coordinate, so that we minimize conflict, and so that we don't short circuit our productivity.

This hemisphere stuff is similar in some ways to that Freudian business about id, and ego, and super-ego, which says that ideas are produced by the unconscious id and then screened by the ego and superego. Our id or creative unconscious is like an uninhibited child within us, a source of raw creativity, akin to the creative, right hemisphere function. But it's counter-balanced by the rational, finger-wagging, "adult" part of us, which is more in line with that logical left brain function. Now, I've made a mixed up soup of these theories, but there is this bit of overlap. And our experience affirms the basic truth of it all. We get frustrated with our spouse for not being "spontaneous," always having to be the practical one. Or maybe we're the practical, logical one, carping about the other being frivolous and never planning for tomorrow. But even closer to home is that we've got this dialogue going on in our own heads. We hear two voices, debating whether to purchase that little "extra" or not. In our projects, it shows up as the paralysis of analysis stifling our creative impulses. Sometimes we even hear people who are hip to the theories say things like, "I'm very left brained," or "she's so right-brained."

But I think we can sort of meld these ideas together and use them like this: If there's a part of us that can be likened to a creative wild-child within us, then why not let it loose for a while and see what happens? If we're graphic designers, why not allow ourselves to lay down a lot of visual ideas all at once? If we're novelists, why not do that 60,000-word dash, never looking back, to a completed first draft? If we permit ourselves to loosen up and run in this way, we know we're going to produce a lot of material. So, how come we have so much trouble doing this? Why do we say, like Oscar Wilde, "I spent all morning putting in a comma, and all afternoon taking it out."? The answer should be obvious by now. It's because we're short circuting ourselves. That inner child is being silenced by the inner adult, whose motto apparently is "children should be seen and not heard." Or we've got the left brain conflicting with the right brain. The id doing battle with the super ego. Pick your metaphor.

To quote Anne Lamott, "The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, 'Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?," you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would have never gotten by more rational, grown up means.

Likewise, as a designer, you want to loosen up and have fun, as we suggested in the last episode. Adopt the attitude, "It doesn't matter, I'm just playing," and noodle around. Let yourself go. Ban thoughts of "But this isn't any good" before you cripple yourself with your own logic.

But we'll pick up on more of this subject in the next show. If you'd like to check out some of the references I made today, please look up the shownotes at designguyshow.blogspot.com, where I've included hyperlinked footnotes. Music is by kcentricity.com. Thanks again for listening. I look forward to having you back next time.

References

(In the interest of time, I've posted the transcript only. Hyperlinked footnotes coming soon.)

Design Guy, Episode 13, The Mind at Play

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:27:00 -0800

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Design Guy, here. Welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

We're talking about the nature of the creative process, and the things we can do to get a handle on it. Last time, we spoke about the creative mind. We described how the conscious and the unconscious parts of our minds work together to help us solve problems and combine elements into ideas. And we likened this mental partnership to making a stew, or building a compost heap. And this is to say that, in our normal, conscious state, we gather the raw materials of our project. Then, over the course of time, this stuff is processed by our unconscious mind. Eventually, this stew of materials will be useful to us. But we need time - time enough for our unconscious to do its work. Because it's on this deeper level, the part of us that dreams, that our mind forms the connections that lead to ideas.

The German Philosopher, Helmholtz,(1) summarized the process in three parts. First, a Preparation Phase, where we gather materials, followed by Incubation, when our unconscious does its unseen work, followed by Illumination, when (quote) "happy ideas come unexpectedly without effort, like an inspiration" (unquote). Illumination is that pregnant moment when solutions come forth, the moment we here about in famous anecdotes: Archimedes Eureka moment.(2) Or J.K. Rowling(3) envisioning the entire basis for the Harry Potter books while riding on the train. And, obviously, this is the state we want to be in all the time, if we can help it. So, how can we?

Jack Foster, in How to Get Ideas, lays down the same basic process, but spends the bulk of his book offering ways to condition our minds for it. First and foremost, and above all else, his advice is to have fun. He writes, "It's not by chance that I list having fun as my first suggestion on how to get your mind into idea-condition. Indeed, in my experience it might well be the most important one. Here's why: Usually in creative departments of advertising agencies a writer and an art director work together as a team on a project. In some departments and occasionally in the ones that I headed, three or four teams work on the same project. When that happened in my departments, I always knew which team would come up with the best ideas, the best ads, the best television commercials, the best billboards. It was the team that was having the most fun. The ones with frowns and furrowed brows rarely got anything good. The ones smiling and laughing almost always did. Were they enjoying themselves because they were coming up with ideas? Or were they coming up with ideas because they were enjoying themselves? The latter. No question about it. After all, you know it's true with everything else - people who enjoy what they're doing, do it better. So why wouldn't it be true with people who have to come up with ideas?" (end of quotation). (4)

Or as Carl Jung said, "Creativity is the mind at play with materials it loves."(5)

So, my advice is that you should find ways to play and keep things light. We've got work to do, of course, but we can still adopt a playful seriousness. Or to think in terms of serious play. It's when we're uptight and anal, that we experience a kind of creative constipation. Maybe that accounts for the furrowed brow that Jack Foster was talking about. But, then again, I was just quoting Jung, not Freud, so I'll just move on to some practical suggestions.

1. Play with your materials.
Loosen up and relax and adopt an attitude of "it doesn't matter, I'm just playing." Give yourself permission to just noodle around with things, and see what happens, what shape things take. Forget about rules for a while and just play in the sandbox of ideas.

2. Play with co-workers.
Depending on your office culture, this doesn't have to mean three-legged races down the hallways. But engage in reparte, play with words, joke around, banter, send weird emails, all that stuff. When we ignite that goofy dynamic, and strive to up the ante with each other, we can come up with all kinds of good and unexpected stuff. But the big idea is that you're keeping it fun with each other. There's nothing more deadly to creativity than a miserable team.

3. Play with your subject matter.
Even make fun of the project, make a parody out of it, think of extreme things you would never really do. Pretend you're the creative team at Saturday Night Live and do a total mockery of a mock up. Will you be able to use any of this material? Maybe, Maybe not. It depends on how much irreverance your client can tolerate. But at least you're thinking outside the box. You're bracketing the subject with a broader spectrum of ideas, ranging from the conservative to the outright absurd.

There's lots of other suggestions I can make along these lines, but before it devolves into stuff like holding pajama day at the office, I'll offer one last point.

4. Having fun with ideas means not getting precious about ideas.
As much as we've been giving attention to the subject, we shouldn't think of ideas as precious or rare. True, some are stronger than others, and truly world shaking ideas don't come along every day, but it's not this class of ideas that we work with every day. And there's a difference between defending a core idea and building a temple around them.(6) If you're getting too precious and protective about ideas, it's probably because you're not coming up with enough of them. Especially, in a team setting, you want to be willing to throw your idea way if someone's got a better one. Think quantity, not quality at first. The quality will come. The cream will rise to the top. But only if you fill the bucket first.

Well, that'll have to do for today. I want to thank you again for tuning in and especially for the encouraging feedback I've received. And if you're just joining us, and you're enjoing this series, please consider letting your voice be heard in the form of a vote at podcast alley, or a comment at iTunes. And don't forget to click that subscribe button. The show is free, and you'll be automatically be alerted to new episodes. But, again I truly thank you for listening, and I hope to have you back next time.

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_von_Helmholtz

2. http://anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=11989

3. http://www.biographyonline.net/writers/j_k_rowling.html

4. Foster, Jack, How to Get Ideas, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1996

5. http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/22447.html?origin=story

6. This phraseology of "building a temple around ideas" comes from a recent episode of KCRW's The Treatment, in which Elvis Mitchell interviews Tony Gilroy. Gilroy speaks about collaborating with film directors and "trading up" to better ideas by exchanging them with each other. Get the episode here.

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Design Guy, Episode 12, The Creative Mind

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Thu, 8 Nov 2007 14:59:00 -0800

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

We live in a create-on-demand world, and, whether you're a graphic designer or a college student working on a writing assignment, or a podcaster trying to come up with his next episode, the question is the same. How can we gain some control of the creative process, so that our minds and imaginations are productive when we need them to be?

As we established last time, creativity is a process. It's often slippery and disorderly, and we can make huges messes along the way, but it IS a process. And AS a process, it consists of steps and actions - practical things we can DO to encourage our productivity. And this ought to encourage us, since we can be proactive in our creativity, rather than passively wait around for ideas to just happen to us.

We also spoke about ideas, because we need ideas, large and small, to get us through our project. But we demystified the subject by explaining that ideas aren't of otherworldy origin, or the domain of the supercreative, but simply new combinations of old elements. Ideas feel fresh because we've made a new juxtaposition of things. So, the trick is to find relationships between these old elements, and put them together in interesting ways to create a new effect or perspective. This is a bit like our reaction when we see people get together. We know our friend, John. We know our friend, Susan. But then they hook up and become a new idea, called John-and-Susan, and it changes our perspective. There's a new dynamic, a combined effect that's different than when they were apart. In the realm of music, someone took rhythm and blues and put it together with country to create a new idea in music, which we know as rock 'n' roll. In the realm of graphic design, Saul Bass(1) took our old fashioned idea of what a movie poster was, and married it to a graphic, modernistic sensibility, and influenced generations of designers as a result. On an every day level, our design compositions are merely new arrangements of the familiar elements of design. It's their organization and layout, the combinations we come up with, that makes them feel like either a new idea or a cliche.

And just a word about cliches. In the realm of ideas, cliches represent the stale side of the spectrum. Cliches are trite, worn out ideas. We've seen or heard them so many times that they've lost their impact. Designers still embrace them, though, because they are so familiar and they communicate so instantly. But smart designers put a fresh spin on the cliche. They add a twist, they augment a cliche with another element, until they've cast the old idea in a new light, making it a somewhat new idea. So if you're frustrated by all the cliches you seem to generate, no need to fret. Just use them as a starting point toward something new.

But returning to the original question about how we sieze control of creativity, its helpful to understand a bit about how that thinking organ between our ears works. After all, creativity is a work of imagination, it's a process of the mind. So, if we can gain some insight into how our minds work, then we can work with it, rather than forcing matters.

Now, there are theories or models about how the mind works. One model describes the mind in terms of its conscious and unconscious parts. The conscious mind represents our wakeful state or level of awareness. But the unconscious mind operates below the level of our normal awareness. It is the part of us that dreams and sorts out the stimuli we receive on our conscious level.

But in the interest of keeping things straightforward and practical, we can think of it this way: As we receive stimuli from the world around us, and as we collect the raw materials of our project, our unconscious mind goes to work on them at a deeper level. It's like we're putting together a stew, and placing it on the backburner of our brains. In the course of time, we consciously toss more things into the pot, where they sit and simmer. What's interesting thing is that we can we can decide to stop thinking about our project, yet our unconcscious mind is still working on it. This should set us at ease in the knowledge that there's a solution waiting to emerge, we just need to gather materials and give it time. This technique is also called composting, which is a nice image for the way our mind converts raw materials into a rich and fertile source for us to draw from.

I believe this is why procrastination is common among creatives, and shouldn't necessarily be thought of us as a bad thing. Because if the unconscious requires to time to do its thing, then it stands to reason that a project can be started too early. Hence, that blank page syndrome I mentioned in the last episode. We may be creatively blocked because the ingredients in our mental stew pot need time to coalesce. The compost heap needs to go through the chemical changes that will make those raw materials useful to us.

But to wrap things up for today, we've identified the first practical thing we can do. And that's to collect those raw materials. We do this in addition to the information gathering we've done with our client. These raw materials are what James Webb Young describes as "specific knowledge about products and people, and general knowledge about life and events."(2) And in light of this discussion about how our minds work, we've got excellent motivation to do so, because we realize that it's not a dry research exercise. It's a strategic, creative tactic. It's a way to set our unconscious mind on the problem early, so it can do its unseen work, sorting out elements and forming connections, so it can supply us with the ideas and solutions that we'll need later.

But that's it for today. I'll be posting show notes and references at my webpage, which is designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com. If you're finding this series helpful, I welcome your feedback in the form of a comment at iTunes or a vote at podcast alley. Well, I thank you again for your support, and for listening, and I hope to have you back next time.

References

1. Saul Bass On The Web

2. James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas, McGraw-Hill, 2003

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Design Guy, Episode 11, Getting A Handle on Creativity

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 09:45:00 -0700

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Design Guy, here. Welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Now, we're talking about the creative process. And in earlier episodes, we discussed the preparation that precedes creativity, which namely takes the form of information gathering. In graphic design, there's always a message at stake - one that we need to craft for an audience. So, we're concerned early on with doing our homework. And once we've laid the groundwork for our project in this way, we're ready to get creative. And, as we said last time, this can go well or poorly, depending on certain factors.

Sometimes creativity seems effortless and automatic. We come to our project bursting at the seams with ideas, and everything almost seems to build itself. We fly through the entire process with ease, and we finish our work exhilarated, knowing that our solutions and the execution of them were right on target. But as many of us know well, that's not always the case. The ideas that came fast and free last week aren't coming anymore. We find ourselves facing a barren page or a blank screen, and we wonder what's wrong. And, as the clock ticks toward our deadline, we begin to despair, or to tie ourselves up in knots of anxiety. It's those problem moments that catch our attention and cause us to wonder what's going on under the surface, what is this creative process, anyway? How does it work? Why does it seem that our best ideas come at random? And can we get some degree of control over our creativity?

I think the best way to get at all this is to start with some definitions. First off, we can rightly describe creativity as a process. Now, granted, it doesn't often feel like a process. In fact, it's frequently a messy, non-linear, and elusive affair, but it's a process nonetheless. And The Oxford American dictionary defines the word "process" as "a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end."(1) Which at least gives us some clue concerning our role in all this. The definition goes part-way to answering the questions, "Are we passive in this process?" "Do ideas just happen to us?" And the answer is "no," because it IS a process. And like any process, there are actions or steps that we can take to encourage creativity. So, we can take heart in the fact that there's a practical side to this, complete with methods and techniques, things we can busy our hands and minds with and DO. But let's home in on our definition of creativity a bit more.

Creativity is usually described as a work of imagination or as a mental process that yields ideas. Ideas, then, are an output of this process. And since we know that the success of our work greatly depends upon the strength of our ideas, we should take the trouble to attempt a definition of this word, also.

Now, it's tempting to think of ideas as something completely new. But that would only be part right. The trouble with thinking of ideas as something that's brand new is that we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to come up with something that the world has never laid eyes on before. And when we think in these terms the task of producing ideas suddenly becomes daunting and out of the reach of mere mortals. But the biggest problem I see is that it puts us completely on the wrong track. People sometimes become mystical about this pursuit of ideas because they think they're channeling something from another world, when the truth about ideas is that they're born out of the common and mundane things of the everyday world. And while it often feels as if we've plucked our ideas from the air, it's safe to say that they're plucked from this terrestrial air that we're all breathing. The truth is that when you break an idea down into its component parts, there's really nothing new or otherworldly about it. It's made out of common stuff.

What IS potentially new or unique about an idea lies in the combination of elements that it contains, and not the elements themselves. As James Webb Young pronounced in his advertising classic, A Technique for Producing Ideas: "An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements."(2) This is an important one, so let me state it again, "An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements."

This statement offers reassurance and solace to us because it lets us in on the secret about ideas, which is that the stuff of ideas is all around us. The trick, if it can be called a trick, is to put them together in a new way, which places us into another realm of discussion, which has to do with our lifelong and constant habit of observing the world around us. I mentioned in earlier episodes that a chief attribute of designers is that they take an interest in the world around them. And I'll go one better today by advising that you stand on your head while you do it. Learn how to really see and learn how to see differently. Don't just look at the positive space of things around you, look at their negative space. If you don't know what negative space is, not to worry, I'll get to that discussion one of these days, too. What we're after are new associations. If ideas are new combinations of old things, then we want to look for relationships. We want to marry things together to produce something different and unique. And we'll talk more about how do that next time.

But that'll have to do for today. Hopefully, this provides us with an initial toe-hold on the creative process.

As usual, show notes are posted at my web page, which is designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com. Thank you again for listening, and I hope to have you back next time.

References

The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, USA, 2005

James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas, McGraw-Hill, 2003

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Design Guy, Episode 10, Getting Creative

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 10:00:00 -0700

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Design Guy, here. Welcome to the show.

This is the program where we set aside the technical manuals and focus on the timeless aspects of design. Software versions come and go, and new forms of media emerge, but the principles behind our work stay pretty much the same. So, it's my hope that these brief discussions will be worth the time investment, since we can commit these principles to long term memory. Better yet, we can put them into practice, knowing they'll serve us throughout our careers. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods. But if you learn principles, you can devise your own methods."

So, prior to the detour that we just concluded concerning the attributes of the designer, we were discussing the earliest stages of the design process. And we said this process of design begins with the work of data gathering. This is the first step in the sequence of practical things that we do as designers. By amassing a bunch of information, we basically prepare ourselves for all the creative work to come. In so doing, we're stocking our mental shelves, we're fueling the creative tank, fertilizing the ground - whatever anology you want to use. The key thing - is that we do it.

If you're kind of an impatient designer who wants to jump right into your favorite authoring environment and get going, you really need to resist that impulse early on. Newer designers may wonder if it's necessary to gather as much information as I was suggesting, but I'd say that, as a rule, it really is. Sometimes we can pull off good results with some pretty scant data, but, on the whole, and especially if the project is at all extensive, the more we know about the things that are important to our client, the better off we'll be. And while, we tend to gather more data than we'll eventually use, it's recommended that you capture a super abundance of stuff. When you have more than you need, you can make better decisions - you can have choices. And, trust me, it's a nice thing to have choices. When you have more than you need, you can cull the best and leave the rest. We can liken this to the way that writers discard pages they've written or the way filmmakers leave scenes on the cutting room floor. But, again, at this early stage, when you're just embarking on the creative journey of your project, you really don't know for sure what you'll keep or what you'll toss, so you want to hang on to all of it.

So we're sitting on this pile of information, and we're feeling pretty knowledgeable and all, we're feeling pretty good about ourselves, until we realize with a growing disquiet within us that we're facing this blank page. And it's not magically filling itself, either. For creatives, this can be the most intimidating sight in the world. It can actually be terrifying. And we realize at this point that it's one thing to have all this information, now what do we do with it? As Marty Neumeier said, "Design is easy. All you do is stare at the screen until drops of blood form on your forehead." He was kidding, of course. Or, at least, he was exaggerating.

Sometimes it seem effortless - ideas come to us fully formed, like bulldogs barking at the garden gate. Other times, we can't come up with a thing, we can't produce one good idea, at least we can't think of any good ones. And, if we're not careful, we can psyche ourselves out. We get performance anxiety. We worry that we'll be exposed for the frauds that we are, that we've just been playing at all this design stuff and now everyone's going to know. In a word, we can panic. And if we panic, we can get into all sorts of trouble. So don't panic. If you're in this position today, even as we speak, don't worry. Help is on its way.

What I'd like for us to do for a few episodes is talk about the creative process. I want to talk about where the ideas come from. About mythical creatures called muses. The unconcious mind, and other things. This is territory that often seems shrouded in mystery, and in a certain sense it is. It's often hard to account for why and when a lightbulb suddenly decides to appear above our head. Why the solution to a puzzle dawns on us at the most unlikely time. So it's a curious thing, this creative process. But, on the other hand, there are things we can know about it that will reassure us. There are certain principles we can get a handle on, so that we don't have to panic when good solutions don't appear to be forthcoming. To a great extent, we can actively manage our creativity rather than feeling totally passive about it.

But I'll conclude today's discussion by offering the first rule of creativity, which is to relax. Don't panic. Relax. When we tense up and then try to produce in that state, it's really counterproductive. To strain and force matters just doesn't work very well. It reminds me of those chinese finger-cuff toys. You may have had them as a kid. They're these little doodads made of woven straw that you slip your friend's index fingers into. When they struggle to pull their fingers apart, they wind up pulling the weave tighter and their fingers get really stuck. It's only when they relax, and stop forcing matters, that the cuff loosens up and they can remove their fingers. And that's what the creative mind is like. We can gently coax ideas, but we can't really force them.

But that's it for today. As always, s how notes are available at my web page, which is designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com. Thanks again for listening, I hope you'll join us next time.

Design Guy, Episode 9, Designer's Attributes Pt. 3

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Mon, 8 Oct 2007 04:39:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores the timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Now, we've been talking about the attributes of the designer. And today, we'll conclude this little rabbit trail with one final observation or truism. And while I call this an attribute, there's a sense in which it's really an aspiration or ideal that encompasses everything we want to be as designers. So, here goes:

Designers have a love for The Craft.

And, when I say craft, I've got a couple of shades of meaning in mind. The first one refers to that affinity or reverence that we've got for the tools and techniques of our trade. Just as an iron smith loves the hammer and the glowing iron and the sparks that fly, we, as designers love the process that we're engaged in, and all the tools and techniques that we use in order to ply our trade.

But graphic designers are engaged in an amazing hybrid of art and craft. On the one hand, design is an art with all of that creative mystique to it. There's that intangible and evasive muse or magic that we seek in the form of inspiration. Mysteriously, an idea forms within us and then we fashion it with our tools, giving it form and substance. It really is a wondrous thing. It's as if we pull rabbits out of hats.

On the other hand, we're engaged in a practical craft. We're like traditional tradesmen - we resemble plumbers or bricklayers who just go to work every day. We use techniques. We obey rules for activities like setting type. And in that respect, we don't always need muses or magic. And, come to think of it, have you ever heard a plumber complain that he couldn't fix your toilet for lack of inspiration? Or a bricklayer complain that he was too creatively blocked to build your patio? But, as designers, we've got this duality or hybrid thing going on. We're creative craftsmen.

But I mentioned that there's a second shade of meaning to the word, craft. When I say that designers love "The Craft," I'm also using the word as a proper noun to describe the family or guild of designers. As designers, we're part of a community. And this community is on a shared path of discovery, wherein we benefit from each other's ideas and discoveries as we share thoughts and ideas among ourselves. And we've also got a love for this community that I call The Craft in a protective sense, because we want to elevate our profession and not see it erode or be cheapened. We want to promote certain ideals for The Craft. We want designers to be ethical and maintain good practices and reputations for fairness and integrity. We want The Craft to have a good name. The Graphic Arts Guild, or G.A.G., is a testament to this idea. And, by the way, if you're not familiar with their book, which comes out every so often, you should look it up. It gives guidance to graphic artists on all manner of best practices, including pricing. As members of The Craft, we become aware that we're not alone. We've got heritage and history and lineage. We're part of something bigger than ourselves. We're members of a tradition that we can honor and contribute to as we fill the world with good design.

So, in closing, I encourage you to cultivate this love of craft. In both senses of the word. I wish you satisfaction as you ply your trade, and I also remind you that you're part of a unique community of craftsmen.

Until next time, this is Design Guy, I thank you again for listening.

References

Graphic Arts Guild Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines, North Light Books, 2001

Design Guy, Episode 8, Designer's Attributes Pt. 2

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Wed, 3 Oct 2007 04:20:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

We're talking about the attributes of the designer. And we began last time by asserting that graphic designers take an interest in the world around them. We said that it's preferable to be a generalist, rather than a specialist. And what we mean to say in this is that it's not a good thing to know your profession to the exclusion of other things. You want to cultivate a curiosity in many things. To that end, you should read widely and expose yourself to new things whenever you can. If you're musical tastes run toward the Smashing Pumpkins, go see an opera. You get the picture. The idea here is that we're supposed to help our clients make a connection with their audience. So, the more informed we are to the world of the client, the more effective we'll be at bridging that gap. In order to do this well, we want to be good at the next attribute. And that's COMMUNICATION.

Robin Landa, in her book Graphic Design Solutions, writes, Graphic designers use words (type), and pictures and other graphic elements (visuals) to communicate. Their art is a visual-verbal expression. The graphic designer mediates between a client with a message to send and the audience. Visuals and words are used by the designer on behalf of the client in order to inform, persuade, or sell." (end of quotation)

And that's a basic definition of graphic design. Visual communication. And as we get deeper into this podcast series we'll tackle all the various elements and principles of design that foster that visual form of communication. So, there's really not much more to say about this right now. To become a better visual communicator, you need to study this craft of graphic design. By learning about contrast or proportion, for example, you communications will improve visually.

Now, although it's obvious, I should point out that this visual communication that we call graphic design is all written and visual. There are no spoken words. But the verbal, spoken form of communication is also a skill that we've got to get better at. It's our verbal skill that will persuade a client to buy into our ideas and to hire us, it's our verbal skill that makes us more skillful at business, that persuade a client to pay us for services rendered. And, of course, the better we can exchange ideas between ourselves as team members on projects, the better our resulting graphic design will be, as we sharpen up our collective vision for the product.

Adrian Shaugnessy in his book, How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, writes, "The way designers present ideas is as important as the ideas themselves. When a good idea is being rejected, it is often the presentation of that idea that is being rejected, and not the idea itself....Spoken communication therefore is a vital component of the modern designer's kitbag. But there is a communication skill even more important than being able to talk convincingly about your work: listening. I'm talking about the acknowledgement that communication is a two-way street, and that your client has a point of view that you need to listen to carefully for clues and unspoken messages." (end of quotation)

Now, if you've been listening to earlier episodes, you'll be experiencing deja vu about now, because we spoke pointedly to the necessity of listening. If you've missed those shows, you can go back and review them, of course.

But I think we'll wrap things up here. And we'll summarize by saying that if the first attribute, which is an interest in the world around us, can be likened to input, then communication (both the visual and verbal kind) is the output. So, we need to recognize that they work together. Garbage in. Garbage out. Or diversified understanding of the world in, rich, layered communications out.

Well, I want to thank you again for listening. If you'd like to check out the show notes, you can find them at my web page, which is designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com. If you've been finding these shows helpful, I'd welcome your feedback in the form of a vote at podcast alley or perhaps a comment at iTunes. Until next time, this is Design Guy, hope you'll join us again.

References

1. Landa, Robin, Graphic Design Solutions, 2nd Ed., OnWord Press, 2000

2. Shaughnessy, Adrian, How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002

Design Guy, Episode 7, Designer's Attributes Pt. 1

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:58:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

If you're just joining us, we're talking about the attributes of the designer. In the last episode, we established the idea that, as designers, we profoundly influence the work we do by the mere fact of who we are as individuals. Our unique way of thinking and solving problems, our personal style and perspective on the world, all have an impact on the product. Our fingerprints are all over our work, so to speak. You can I.D. a designer through their work sometimes. And this is obviously why certain designers are sought after. We tend to describe their work as unique or distinctive. So, it stands to reason that if we give one design problem to two different designers, we can expect somewhat different outcomes.

At the same time, though, there are certains traits that designers should have in common. Unique as we all are, there are certain stereotypes or generalizations that ought to hold up in order for graphic designers to qualify as graphic designers.

If your into movies, you'll know how it is to hear that a certain director is rumored to be helming a film project. When we hear the name Tim Burton or Steven Soderbergh or Guillermo Del Toro, we develop different expectations. At the same time, we're pretty confident that while they think divergently, and that they'll all emphasize different themes, that they've got some other things in common. They all know a thing or two about storytelling, and casting, and where to put the camera.

That's how it is with designers. Unique as we are, some things are the same.

So, in no particular order, I'd like to describe the traits we can expect.
And I'll just mention the first one today, which is this. A designer takes an interest in the world around them.

Adrian Shaughnessy, in his book, How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul, (1)writes: "Among the myriad definitions of graphic design, one of the most illuminating is by American designer and writer Jessica Helfand. According to Helfand, graphic design is a visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a langauge of cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye."

Commenting further on Helfand's definition, Shaugnessy says, "I like Helfand's definition. Her first sentence is a conventional summary of graphic design; few would argue with it. But the second part of Helfand's definition provides the key to producing meaningful and expressive graphic design, (when she refers to): 'cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences.' (These) are the elements that give work authority and resonance. And if you want to introduce these elements into your work, it means taking a interest in everything that goes on around you, and having curiosity about areas other than graphic design: politics, entertainment, business, technology, art, ten-pin bowling and mud wrestling.

This cultural awareness ranks higher than technical ability and academic qualifications in the designer's portfolio of attributes." (End of quotation)

James N. Frey, (2) author of How to Write a Damn Good Novel, expresses the same sentiment in writing the following:

"You''ll need to be a general reader, because you need to know, well, a lot of stuff. (Be) a well read generalist, as opposed to a specialist, like a chiropractor or plumber or teacher. How can you create a Buddhist character if you don't know what meditation is for? How can you create a carpenter if you don't know what a T square and a level are for? A fiction writer needs a grasp of history and philosophy, art, religion, poetry, and so on, in order to understand different viewpoints and world views, to make his or her characters whole." (End of quotation)

Think of it this way, think in just general social terms. People who are well read and aware of many things can relate to more people. If you're an engineer and all you can talk about is engineering, you can't connect effectively to another person. But if you can talk about the news or fishing or the latest of episode of Heroes, in addition to engineering, then you build a more robust bridge to the other person. As graphic designers we want to tap into the culture or zeitgeist or ethos, as I mentioned last time, so we can be more effective. So start broadening your horizons. Watch TV shows you formerly shunned. If you read Rolling Stone, try reading McCalls. You'll be amazed at what you can bring into your world from someone else's.

And that's it for today. As usual, I'll post show notes at my webpage, which is designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com. Thank again for joining us, and I hope to have you back next time.

References:

1. Shaughnessy, Adrian, How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002

2. James N. Frey, The Ten Rules of Writing, http://www.jamesnfrey.com/

Design Guy, Episode 6, Harry Houdini and the Attributes of a Designer

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 18:35:00 -0700

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Design Guy here, welcome to the show.

This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

If you've been following along, you'll know that we've been talking about the very beginning stages of the design process, and the skills we need to develop in order to gather the information that fuels our creative work.

So, moving right along, there are some practical process things we could talk about next, like brainstorming and how to get ideas, but before we do that, I think this is a good time for us to pause and consider the designer in all of this.

If we think about it, the designer is the first medium through which ideas pass. Before we choose a physical format or medium, we're it. And I realize this is a really obvious statement. But if "the medium is the message," as Marshall McLuhan(1) famously declared, then I think it's worth stepping outside ourselves for a moment, to consider what kind of medium we are. What kind of attributes should we have as designers before we even get started on the work?

Let's consider the word medium for a moment. When we say something is immediate, it means there's nothing inbetween, there's a direct connection between two things. But when there's a medium, we mean to say that there's something inbetween, something that intervenes. Designers intervene. We take one thing, and pass it through the medium of ourselves, so it becomes a somewhat different thing. We're like prisms that receive the light and then refract it. We take our client's message and then split it apart, we break it all down. We perform a reductive work so we can identify the component parts. Then we build it back up again in just the right way, and communicate it. We basically perform a work of translation. We take ordinary language and convert it into visual language.

Medium is also the word used to describe individuals who claim to have psychic ability. People who claim to be conduits or channels to another world. I find this interesting because we're applying the word medium to an actual person.

If you've ever seen the old Tony Curtis film, Houdini,(2) you'll remember that he and his wife were obsessed with life after death. They made a pact that they would seek to make contact with each other if one should pass on to "the other side." So you may remember the scene where she visits a psychic medium, who conducts a seance. They're all in a dimly lit room. There was the typical mumbo jumbo and theatrics staged to convince Mrs. Houdini that she was communing with Harry himself. But, alas, this medium was a charlatin attempting to cash in on the poor widow's grief-driven compulsion to make contact. The point here, though, is that Mrs. Houdini was in search of a medium. She wanted to find a person who could bridge a gap that she could not cross by herself.

Our clients are like this. They look to us as channels or mediums to their marketplace, where they hope to connect with an audience. They can't cross this gulf all by themselves. They know that they need someone with special attributes. They need someone with specialized communication skills, who can send their message across in just the right way. And if we're really on our game, we might be able to channel ghosts of a different kind. I'm being a little bit cute here. But I'm referring to what's sometimes called the zeitgeist, or spirit of the age. Which is to say that wherever we can , we want to inform our work with a keen sense of the cultural context or our audience—their world, their ethos.

Now, in light of everything we've said, we can see why certain designers are sought after. They've got certain attributes that the client is looking for. They want these attributes to show through the final product.

We see this principle at work when we're evaluating a design piece. If we describe it as witty or traditional or sophisticated or minimalistic, then we're describing the designer to a great extent. These characteristics mirror the person behind the work. And if you give the same design problem to two different designers, you'll get two different results. They may both be valid, and indeed one design problem can be solved a thousand different ways. But, I believe there are certain characteristics that all designers ought to share in common. There are some common attributes that will show through in the work of even the most wildly divergent designers. And we'll talk about what some of those attributes are in the next episode.

For now, let's just establish that the designer is like the physical format we'll select to do our work within, because we profoundly influence the work. And, again, this is a really obvious statement. But, if we want our attributes to reflect well on the work, we'll give some consideration to ourselves. We'll want to make sure we've got certain characteristics in place, or that we're at least developing them. We want the right stuff. And we'll talk about that next time.

But that's all we have time for today. As always, show notes are available at designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by kcentricity.com. I thank you again for listening and I hope to have you back again.

References

1. http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/

2. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045886/

Design Guy, Episode 5, How Design Begins, Pt. 2

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Mon, 3 Sep 2007 06:36:00 -0700

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Design Guy, here. Welcome to the show.

This is the program that offers a pause from our technical manuals: all the keeping up we do with tools, technologies, the state of the art. Now, we've got to keep up, of course. It's essential we stay current. But it also can be overwhelming. There is so much to keep up with, it's like drinking from a firehose. We get cognitive overload. And it's hard to retain things that we know are going to continue to change.

On the other hand, we want to learn principles. The good news about principles is that they don't really change. We can learn them with confidence that our time investment is not wasted. We'll know that at least this part of our knowledge base will not erode. Software will come and go, but principles remain. And I think that sends a message to our brains that this is stuff we should latch on to, that we ought to retain. At least that's my theory, and my experience. And that's where this show comes in. Hopefully, we can offer a bit of white space or margin from other concerns, by setting aside the transient information, and speaking to timeless things - things we can commit to long term memory.

Now, we spoke last time about how design begins, and today I'd like to amplify those thoughts and add a few suggestions. We said that listening is key. Or as Hillman Curtis says, listening is an activity, wherein we ask the right questions in the right way, and then fine tune our reception to the answer, however buried it may be.(1)

In other words, we query our clients to learn what they really want. We want to excavate their core message, their story, so we can identify the thematic drivers of our project. But to do this effectively requires skill in the art of questioning. Questions are to this process, what picks and shovels are to archaealogical digs. To carry the analogy further, questions also act like sifters that filter sand and rock from the stuff we're after. And we want the bones. We want the DNA - the genetic blueprint of our project, so to speak.

The lazy thing to do is to just "get requirements." If we run with requirements we've gotten passively, rather than interactively probing, even challenging our client at times, then we risk informing our work with junk information. In our gusto to get going, we'll start off with a lot of zeal, but soon realize with a creeping dread that there is something rotten in Denmark. We'll find ourselves going back to the drawing board on things we thought were resolved. Or the client, sensing that something is amiss, will suggest too many changes at review milestones. The scenario is all too common. We can sidestep that messiness by laying the foundation of understanding. And, once again, we do that by carefully questioning, and then listening.

We ended the last show on a cautionary note. We said that once we've gotten the right answers, we've got to watch out that we don't go wrong. It's actually possible to make a proper diagnosis, then execute the wrong solution. We safeguard against this by asking ourselves, as designers, a number of questions. We've queried our client. Now we turn the line of inquiry on ourselves. And this ought to start as early as possible. It even runs parallel to the client inquiry. We just want to prevent ourselves from jumping to conclusions or to specific solutions too early.

The idea is to avoid being rash, by suspending our internal biases and avoiding the ruts that we naturally fall into. We all have comfort zones or favorite tools that, truth be told, may not be ideal for a project, and we need to be self-aware enough to realize this. We want to start with a blank slate. Just throw out assumptions as much as we can. It may not be appropriate to ask ourselves, right out of the gate, "What style of website should this be?" We've already assumed it's a website. Don't ask these presumptive questions. A better question is "Which format might address this design problem best?" And then think through the advantages and disadvantages of a variety of different approaches or formats. You want to broaden your horizons at this stage.

We want to do research. What is research but just another form of asking and answering your own questions. Camp out at a search engine for a while and gather information.
Learn what you can about your client and their industry. Try to discover their strengths, weaknesses, market opportunities, and market threats.

Find out what their competition is specifically doing. Look at who competitors are marketing to and how they've designed their products and supporting media. This will help you later on, as you consider ways you can differentiate your client from their competition.

In all of this, you're thinking expansively. You're casting a wide net for information. You're keeping your antenna up, and your eyes open. And because you are, you'll surprise yourself when you begin to search for solutions. You'll come up with fresher solutions. That's why it's important to remain in this mindset for a while before winnowing everything down to a solution.
Of course, there can be too much of a good thing. You want to avoid the paralysis of analysis. But gather as much information as you need right now. Just toss it all into the funnel, knowing you can narrow down and throw out what you don't need later.

A good analogy is an ice berg. It's a good way to visualize all of this. Think of an iceberg - there's a relatively small part that's revealed above the water, compared to the mass of ice below the surface. Likewise, there's a lot of listening and questioning and research that goes on below the surface to amass the information we need. But the final product, which is the tip of the iceberg, only reflects a small amount of this. Nevertheless, we need to gather that body of information before we can surface the stuff we'll use.

So, we've gotten really smart about the design problem and have gathered a lot of helpful information, all while we're broadening our horizons, and we're ready to approach the creative process. We've basically created fertile ground for problem solving and idea generation and brainstorming. And we'll get into all that good stuff in a future episode. Perhaps not the very next one, but soon.

And that's today's show. Let me remind you that show notes are available at my web page, which is designguyshow.blogspot.com. I've included hyperlinked footnotes to references I've made. And if you want to study a topic further, the book references will take you directly to Amazon where you can get a copy for yourself. By the way, if you're enjoying this ongoing discussion about design, please cast your vote for Design Guy at podcast alley, or leave an encouraging word via the iTunes comment feature on my iTunes profile page. Until next time, this is design guy. Thanks for listening!

References:

1. Curtis, Hillman, MTIV: Process, Inspiration, and Practice for the New Media Designer, New Riders Press, 2002

Design Guy, Episode 4, How Design Begins

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 04:14:00 -0700

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Design guy here. Welcome to the show.

This is the program that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.
Last episode we explored Graphic Design. We laid out a basic definition first by clarifying it's difference from fine art. In fine art, it's perfectly okay to be subjective and to allow for individual interpretation, or to have no message at all. But Graphic design is different in that it must support an objective typographic message. If it doesn't communicate something specific, we've failed at our mission. We also identified typography as the essential component of graphic design. Without typography, there is no message, and if there's no message, there is no graphic design.

Today, we'll talk a bit about process. More to the point, we'll ask HOW does this process begin? In short, it begins with listening.

New Media Designer, Hillman Curtis, gives us insight about listening. He says, Listening is an activity. It's a matter of asking the right questions in the right way. And then fine-tuning your reception to the answer, however buried it may be.(1)

Now, no matter what we're designing, whether it's a post card or a passenger ship, what we're listening for are requirements. It's the requirements that define our project. We want to know about dimensions and deadlines, we want to know about constraints and content. We want to gather all the all the guiding factors that will put us on a sure path to reaching our destination.

But before we can assemble all these requirements, we've got to get comfortable with this activity of listening. Sounds simple, right? The client tells us stuff, we right it down, we go to work. In practice, it's far more tricky. Clients sometimes don't tell us stuff, or they tell us the wrong stuff, based on well-meaning, but misguided preconceptions. Or they're not even in touch themselves with what they really want. This leaves gaps. And we've got to get skilled at filling those gaps. The way to do it is by getting good at asking questions. I know, it sounds simple right? But here, too, we often ask the wrong questions. We bring our own preconceived notions and start down the wrong path of inquiry. We funnel the client toward a solution that suits our capability and comfort zone, more than it addresses their needs. This whole area can be slippery. So, what's a designer to do?

Let's answer that by first understanding what our goals in listening are. Where should our line of inquiry take us? The short answer is: to the heart of the matter.We'll ask our client open ended questions, questions that won't elicit simple yes or no responses. We want to get them talking, we want to draw it out from them. And we want to give them a wide berth at first, rather than hem them in by tut-tutting over ideas that sound expensive.

It's like we're probing, digging, sifting through the real issues and the red herrings. And what we're trying to uncover, what we're trying to get to, is what our clients really WANT. We want to know what STORY they are trying to tell. We want to know what their true goals are, including the obstacles to those goals, we want to get to the heart of their message, including the subtext, the implied. All these elements can be summarized by the word THEME. If we know what our theme is, then we've got the seed out of which a project grows, the engine that drives it. And make no mistake: Your solutions will be organic when they grow out of theme. It's when we're unclear about theme, that our work becomes contrived, as we muck about with style or other things to compensate for our lack of understanding.

Now, This pursuit of understanding, and this questioning process may take place over more than one meeting with time in between for research and internal discussion. When we've gotten really clear on what our clients want, their story, which theme, this is when requirements start to come in to focus. And this is where we've got to remain vigilant with ourselves and the clients. It's so easy to get the right answers and then go wrong. I mentioned before that we can funnel a client toward a solution that suits our capability and comfort zone, more than it addresses their needs. Sometimes that's because we have a favorite tool. We have a hammer,so to speak, and everything looks like a nail. We've got to watch out for this by remaining open to ALL the possibilities, by not limiting ourselves to top of the head solutions..

We do this by turning the questions on ourselves. We point them in our own direction. We have to ask ourselves, as designers, a whole lot of things..
And we'll do so...next time.

For now, let's just recognize that listening all takes practice. Clients are all different, with different styles of communication. It will take experience get good at this. Sometimes you have to labor through this. And labor is a good word. Labor as in childbirth. Socrates, likened himself to a midwife, who would squeeze others with questions, to give birth to knowledge.(2) Get comfortable with probing for the heart of the matter, with drilling down, with sifting and sorting and discerning. This is the key to laying the foundation of understanding that lead you to on-target solutions that will delight your clients.

Well, that's it for today. I'll be posting show notes on my blog, which may be found at designguySHOW.blogsopt.com.

Thanks so much for listening. Until we meet again, this is design guy.

References:

1. Curtis, Hillman, MTIV: Process, Inspiration, and Practice for the New Media Designer, New Riders Press, 2002

2. http://www.socraticmethod.net/

Design Guy, Episode 3, On Graphic Design

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 05:05:00 -0700

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Design guy here. Welcome back.

This is the show that explores timeless principles of design and explains them simply.

Last episode we defined design as the act of creating order out of chaos. And whether we're talking graphic or interior or environmental design, the basic definition stands because we're all engaged in the same PROCESS. It's a process that STARTS with a number of unrelated pieces and ENDS with an ordered unit. (1)

Looking closer, Graphic design has its own set of concerns that distinguish it from other forms of design. And, I think, right from the start, we have to be clear about what graphic design is not. And that's Art. Oh, sure it is AN art. It's practitioners are artists. But it's not Art with a capital A in that it's not fine art. This is where people get confused. Especially when we see some of the stunning works of graphic design by luminaries like Paul Rand (2) or Milton Glaser.(3) Their work should be viewed in a gallery. They're models of artistic excellence. So, what's the difference? Are we splitting semantical hairs, or what?

The distinction... is a question of motivation or purpose. Fine art is something that can be done in a loft, which is to say, it can be done for highly individualized ends. It can be done with no conscious purpose. It can be highly SUBjective. You might do it for your own enjoyment. Or to get a certain technical effect or for any other reason in the world. Sometimes there's a statement being made. Other times, if there's meaning, we'll leave that to the eye of the beholder to interpret. In other words, it's subject to personal interpretation, and IF it's subject to interpretation, it can mean anything.

When we cast the issue in these terms, we begin to see that graphic design is different. It's inherently Objective. Sure, it INVOLVES art, and designers can leave room for some ambiguity or personal interpretation, after all, this generates questions in the viewer, which intensifies their interaction. But, ultimately, Graphic design is done with a clear, specific aim in mind. And what is that aim, but communication? Communication of what? The artist's inner feelings on the day of creation? No, it's not about that. It's not subjective, as we've said. Graphic design is linked to an objective, typographic message. We can communicate that message artistically, in a stylized way, there may even be a strong individual signature on the work that makes one aware of the artist behind it.

I mentioned Milton Glaser before, and I'm thinking of his famous, iconic Dylan poster.(4) It's distinctly Glaser. But, in the end, it's commercial art. It's meant for commerce, to support a music company's product. And we're usually trying to sell stuff, whether that's the advantages of a certain denture cleaner, or a socially conscious screed about the impacts of deforestation. Regardless of subject matter, we've got to transmit specified meaning. And if people HAVEN'T understood, for example, that the iPhone is the most advanced, hip, web-capable phone available, then we've failed at our mission. If our work is not tethered to an objective typographic message, then we might as well stay in our lofts, because we're doing fine art.

Massimo Vignelli (5) describes Graphic Design, in its purest form, as Information Design. As such, it doesn't even require imagery. It's about creating readable, ordered messages. In fact, type IS our primary imagery. Letterforms are symbols that create words which have power of themselves to produce pictures in the minds of our audience. If we set the word, "home," all by itself on a page, it evokes the most primal associations in all of us. There's no need to pay Corbis licensing fees for that photo of a house on a hill. Words are your best clip art.

Hence, the rise of the swiss graphic school of design (6), which placed a premium on functional objectivism. Josef Muller Brockman (7), a pioneer associated with grid systems (8) moved away from an illustrative style of advertising to an objective, typographic approach. When images were used, they were not sized arbitrarily, but according to their importance. The driver of his work was words. Pages were structured, not treated as a free form canvas. And the structure was based on the metrics of type. The measure of their leading, their point size. Typography is the primary discipline of graphic design. Without it, there is no graphic design.

I'll conclude by quoting a portion from Quentin Newark's great book, appropriately titled, What is Graphic Design? (9)

Graphic design is the most universal of all the arts. It is all around us, explaining, decorating, identifying, imposing meaning on the world. It is in the streets, in evertything we read, it is on our bodies. We engage with design in road signs, adverstisements, magazines, cigarette packets, headache pills, the logo on our tshirt, the washing label on our jacket. It is not just a modern or capitalistic phenomenon. Streets full of signs, emblems, prices, sale offers, official pronouncements and news would all have been just as familiar to ancient Egyptians, medieval italians or the poeple of Soviet Russia. Graphic design sorts and differentiates - it distinguishes one company or organization or nation from another. It informs - it tells us how to bone a duck or how to register a birth. It acts on our emotions, and helps to shape how we feel about the world around us. Imagine if graphic design was banned, or simply disappeared overnight. There would be no written word, no newspapers, no magazines, no internet, no science to speak of. We would enter another Dark Ages, a thousand years of ignorance, prejudice, superstition and very short lifespans. Rather than a frivolous extra, the uses and purposes of graphic design are so integral to our modern world - civilization - that Marshall McLuhan named us "typographic man."

There's much more to say about this topic. I'm tempted to start a series on it. But I won't. I think we can move to a lower tier of discussion and revisit the grand subject from time to time. We'll look at the trees, and sometimes look at the forest to maintain perspective.

Well, that concludes today's discussion. I'll post info on some of the references I made today, including links to related books at Amazon, because some of you will want to add these to your library. My blog is located at designguySHOW.blogspot.com. That's designguySHOW.blogspot.com. Music by Kcentricity.com.

Thanks again for listening. Hope to have you back again.

1. White, Alex, The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architechture, and Type, Allworth Press, 2002

2. http://www.commarts.com/CA/feapion/rand/

3. http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/exhibit-art-is-work

4. http://www.areaofdesign.com/americanicons/glaser.htm (Scroll down to view the referenced poster.)

5. http://www.designobserver.com/archives/000218.html

6. http://graphicdesign.about.com/od/styles/p/swiss.htm

7. http://www.filterfine.com/resources/jmb/bio.htm

8. Muller Brockmann, Josef, Grid Systems in Graphic Design, Arthur Niggli Publisher, 1996 Ed.

9. Newark, Quentin, What is Graphic Design,? Rotovision, 2007 Ed.

Design Guy, Episode 2, What is Design?

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 09:39:00 -0700

Download Episode 2 Design Guy here. Welcome to the show. This is the program that explores timeless principles of design, and explain them simply. Today, we'll tackle the fundamental question. The one that frames everything to follow. So, before we get too specific, to define, say, graphic design, we want to begin by asking, "What is design?" What is design, itself? Now, there's a number of ways to answer the question. But the definition that I believe really distills it down to its essence, is this one: Design is the act of creating order out of chaos.(1) And what is chaos, but a randomness. It's a senseless jumble of elements. It's an absence of rules, a complete breakdown from any scheme that would lend sense or reason, or purpose or meaning to anything. And as human beings, we all have a desire for this order, it's a drive that's in our individual and collective psyche. That need to move away from chaos is in all of us. And when we're engaged in design, that's what's going on under the surface. It's really what's driving our efforts and moving our hands as our minds are churning away on the problem. Now, as a theme, this idea of order versus chaos runs really deep in our culture. It forms the foundation of our sacred books. Take the Bible for example, which starts right off, of course, with an account of creation. But what's even more interesting in light of our definition of design, is that it goes on to describe the earth being initially formless, and void, basically in a state of chaos, as if it's just raw material. And it's only after this Creator performs an act of Design by ordering it, that he can declare it "good." When it was chaos, it was not good or pleasing. But now that everything has been put into order, with purpose and function, it can be declared good. And the same account goes on to describe mankind as having been made in the image of a Creator/Designer. And, of course, man is ever ordering and designing his world. Some of us listening today would describe ourselves as creative professionals as we go about designing the little worlds of our websites or posters or books, etc. So, we see this concept everywhere we look. It's all around us. So as designers, we're constantly engaged in it as we do our work, which boils down to combining many elements into cohesive whole. The more successful we are at integrating elements, the better our design outcomes will be. I like the word "integrate", especially in light of it's opposite, which is "disintegrate," which basically means to fall apart. I think that's why we speak in terms of design problems. They're like puzzles to be put together, or strings to be unknotted. As visual designers, we help untangle the problem of communication for our clients. We give shape and form and hierarchy to their message. Without our help, things fall apart. There's less meaning or purpose or sense to things that are poorly designed. So, if you call yourself a "designer", you want to realize that you're providing a true service to others in that you're helping them to order and make sense of their worlds: You just completed a website for some local musicians - well, you've just advanced how they perceive themselves, and how they want to communicate that idea to the world. You've created packaging for a new product - you've just given expression to something, you've somehow made it more tangible, so that people taking it off the shelf with their hands, can better grasp it with their minds, and assign meaning to it. This could be something mundane, a bottle of organic dandruff shampoo, but you've enhanced understanding and meaning so that others can better fit this new thing into the order of their lives, and be happier for it. And this kind of enhancement of order and purpose and meaning captures somewhat of the definition and high calling of design. And that's it for today. If you'd like to check out show notes, they're available at my web page, which is designguyshow.blogspot.com. Music is by Kcentricity.com. I thank you for listening, and hope to have you back again. References 1. White, Alex, The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architechture, and Type, Allworth Press, 2002.

Design Guy, Episode 1, Intro Episode

info@anthonyrotolo.com (DesignGuyShow.BlogSpot.com) — Mon, 6 Aug 2007 09:06:00 -0700

Download Episode 1

Design Guy here, welcome to the show.

This is our premier episode, so, by way of introduction I'd like to explain what the show is about, and how you'll benefit.

We live in a design-driven age. We've witnessed a productivity revolution and the spawning of vast amounts of new products and services. Along side of that, we see the rise of design as the high ground or competitive advantage, the differentiator, really, that allows business to stake out and hold unique market positions longer.

The other amazing phenomenon that's occurred is this power-to-the-people shift that places creation tools in the hands of us all. Desktop publishing, of course, is old, old news by now. But across the board, whether your arena is the graphic arts or publishing or music or film, the cost of entry and the ease with which people from all walks of life can participate has become democratized. The tools just get better and cheaper every day. So, there's a sense in which everyone is a designer, or at least it feels that way. We're all design guys, and I mean that in a gender neutral way, of course. The impetus for this new program, therefore, is to recognize these facts, and help make the principles of design accessible to professionals and ordinary folks, alike.

Now, there's lots of stuff out there about design, including podcasts. So, why this one? Well, often, these programs focus on technique. Others keep us abreast of industry happenings. And, while these, indeed, are helpful, and while I'll probably refer you to these programs from time to time, that kind of information tends to have a short shelf life.

What I'll endeavor to do, instead, is point up the timeless stuff. I want to impart information that doesn't change. Ideas that don't expire with successive software releases or date themselves to current events. This way we can concern ourselves with principles that'll stick in our long term memory, rules we can recall when we've lost our way, creatively speaking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said,

If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods, but if you learnprinciples you can devise your own methods.

My own background is graphic design. And while I'll be speaking to it in particular, I think we'll find that many principles relate to design in general. So, whether you're engaged in print or web or film, or anything else, a lot of these concepts will apply because they transcend the media you're working in.

A few words about the format of the show....And I know some of you have got to be wondering - how are we supposed to discuss visual media in an audio format? I suppose it's a reasonable concern. But, what I intend to do, is to point to the pictures we've all got in our heads. The coca-cola logo. Or the proportions of a human being. And I think we'll do just fine. As far as length is concerned..My aim is to keep each episode brief, so that in mere minutes we can get a new concept under our belts. And hopefully, over the course of time, some lightbulbs will appear above your head and you'll have some new tools to apply to your craft and some markers to guide you on your way.

Until next time, this is design guy. Thanks for listening.

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