Revisions

Memo - Culture

In an increasingly digital word, technology changes faster than most people can adapt. Every few months the best and newest electronics come and people rush out to buy them. To keep up with these changes, all other aspects of our life must try and keep up, including design.

The ability of design to change according to the culture it must appeal too is incredibly interesting. The current generation is very tech savvy, and a lot have internet access 24/7. In order to appeal to this audience, designers must look at the culture as a whole. Who are they? What do they do? What do they like? How long can I keep their attention? Designs trying to appeal to the younger crowds will most like will be very sleek, very clean. For proof of this you don’t need to go further than looking at advertisements for smart phones. Most of these will have the device, at an angle, set in front of a solid background. By keeping the advertisement uncluttered, they allow their device to be the center of attention. This allows it to capture the focus of the audience easily, by drawing their eye directly where they want it to go.

Design styles must also change in order to keep up with the technology. The designs must be able to work on all sorts of mobile devices. Laptops, netbooks, tablets, smartphones. How small do I have to make this? Do I need to re-arrange the page to fit better on a smaller screen? In addition to the hardware, things like HTML5 also influence design. Any new change in our interaction must be followed by changes in designs to help compensate.

I really enjoyed learning about culture in design because after reading about it, it became something that I could then see in my everyday life; once it was seen, it could not be unseen! It changed how I looked at advertisements, book covers, websites, and packaging. It also amazed me how much of this design based on culture was being used in conjunction with social media. Every page had buttons to link it to another communication like Facebook, Twitter, Email, Tumblr.

In our growingly connected culture, knowing how to design based on the interests of your audience is going to become an increasingly important factor.

Book Cover

Hey it's my fifth and final re-design! I had been holding out on this one so i could take my time and really put lots of though into it.
We have all seen the original design of this book. Most of the class agreed it was quite odd for a design book to be designed so badly. For my assignment i decided to challenge myself to come up with a better design.
As i was doing this i decided i wanted to keep some of the original book's layout. I wanted to keep the placement of the title and author's name in similar places, and also keep the horizontal band across the middle part of the book.

The most striking design aspect i used was contrast. I chose to go with a black and white contrast because it is simple, and elegant. I wanted the design to be able to stand out, but also to work well with both the QR tag and the UPC code.  The colors of the book will pop, and draw the attention of the readers.

Something fun i did with the re-design was in the title. I used the different styles of fonts listed in the book, and applied them to the word "design" in the title. I felt that it would reinforce the idea that this was a design book,  but also be a fun playful aspect to the book.

The biggest thing i wanted to do with this redesign was to reinforce the idea of culture in design. In order to do this, i had to think about what design meant to people in our generation. The first thing that came to mind was of course Photoshop! Graphic design is a very popular activity among people in my generation, and the most prominent tool in their arsenal is Photoshop. To reinforce the aspect of culture the most important thing to do was to create a book that looked like a work in progress. In order to do so i included the grid-lines, which are a very prominent part of design. I made sure that the canvas and lines were a nice enough proportion to each other. While i di not use them exactly to align everything on the cover, i made sure that the did not look intrusive or distracting to the design. I also felt like i should include the mouse pointer, as it makes it feel like they are looking right at a computer. Originally i planned to go even further and add more Photoshop elements into the design, but felt that their addition would be too distracting, and would not properly convey the right message.

Finally, i once again included a QR tag into my design. These tags are the wave of the future. They allow you to quickly aggregate information with the click of a button. The one on this cover goes to the book's Amazon page.

My final re-design, and very cool book cover.

Business Card 2.0

Front

For my next re-design, i decided to create a "business" card for myself. I use the business term lightly because it's more of a social thing, and less of a formal one. Being a giant geek and gamer, i like to go to comic conventions, and also make connections with fellow gamers wherever i can find them. In addition to that, i am also a huge fan of social media, experimenting with many of the available ones. I felt that i could create a "contact card" that would let people connect with me easily, and it would be something i could easily share with people. I call it 2.0 because instead of a traditional card, this one has my gaming tags, and social media addresses, and also a QR tag on the back. Since the way we connect is evolving, i felt it was only fair the business card did too.

Back

I tried to really implement rhetoric into this design. What i mean by that is that i really tried to persuade the audience to find and contact me online. How so? well by providing 5 different ways to find me. I included 2 gamertags, 2 social media websites, and my email. By giving them so many ways to reach me, i am basically saying "HEY DO THIS". In addition to the 5 ways, i also include "Find me online" to just outright state what they should do. The rhetoric is strong because there is only one propose fr the card, and i make it very clear.

I think the most important part of this design is culture.Culture plays a big part in most designs now because of our rapidly evolving internet presence. As you can see, none of the traditional ways of contact are on the card. I have no address or phone number, since those are the old ways of communicating. I include only the most popular current ways of communication, email, Facebook, and Twitter. As part of the 2.0 you can see i included a QR (quick response) tag on the back of the card. By snapping a picture of this code, you easily get all of the same information provided on the card. By including this, i give the recipient the option to simply discard my card and leave all the information stored on their phone or mobile device. Culture also played a part in changing the orientation, since i felt it should be horizontal unlike traditional cards.

Now for the more design-y parts of my card, i chose red and black for the colors because they are my favorite, and this card should represent me. These colors also create a great contrast, which is always a plus. For the font, i had to use two different ones. My main font was a sans serif font, that was all uppercase, as i felt it looked more futuristic and modern. I had to change the font for providing my information, because some of it is case sensitive. I had to keep a similar theme so i chose a font that was similar, but had lowercase letters. And finally, to add my personal touch, i included a flame symbol, and a motto that i use to represent me.

EDIT: Craaap. My pictures came out tiny for some reason. I made sure to make my canvas the same size as a business card but somehow it shrunk incredibly.

Graphics

Visual culture is a very important factor when deciding on what graphics to use. One such example would be the book cover i plan to design. We use two books in this class, and neither have very exciting cover art. The reason i feel culture is important is that these books should be designed to appeal to current college students. Our generation has a growing trend of more and more people using photo editing programs and becoming interested in design. In order to appeal to the culture, i plan t create a cover that looks like a work in progress. One of the corners of the design will be peeled away to reveal the grid-lines underneath, there will be dashed boxes around some parts, there will me measurements and icons. By doing this, it will be easier for the readers to feel connected with the book because it will seem like something that the could do themselves. Another idea is to present the cover as it would look in the program itself, with toolbars and such. By doing so, i can create a very cultured cover, one that appeal to the masses interested in design.

Texas Tech Typography

Quite a title. Texas Tech University has and incredibly detailed and thorough  set of rules and guidelines which help to create a solid sense of community. Texas Tech uses only 2 kinds of texts, a Serif by the name of Charter, and a Sans serif called Helvettica Nue. Charter is used for any headings and material with lots of university information, while helvettica is used for subheadings and body text. I think the use of serif and sans creates an amazing contrast. By using red headings with charter text, with black helvetica font for the body, the contrast created becomes instilled in the reader's memory, since the same style is seen repeatedly in various materials. While i think that the use of the oldstyle serif to pay homage to the traditional ways of an old university, i think it could be replaced with a modern font style as a way of showing progress, a way of updating the university's style.


I for one love the Tech Identity Guidelines, i feel that they have been thoroughly thought out and researched, and they are very strong, and present a great style for the university.

Resume - Gaming Industry?

For my third redesign I decided to do my resume. After seeing those very interesting examples from the internet, I felt I should try and create a resume that was different. Instead of staying with the traditional black and white boring formal resume, I tried making it more uniqe. This task turned out to be harder than I though, as the Technical Communication doesn’t really lend itself to uniqe design as a Photography or Art Design based one would. I thought I would try anyway, and I tried to use gaming as a sort of goal for the resume. What I mean by this is that I tried to create a resume that was inspired by video games. While it didn’t work out exactly as planned, it managed to retain a fe aspects from my idea.

The first and foremost principle I covered in my re-design was contrast. Because most resumes are usually black and white, I decided to keep the colors, but reverse their use. I made the background black, and used white text. I used grey as a compromise between both, because it would allow for the contrast between the two to be softened.  The gray was light enough to offset the black, but dark enough to have a great contrast with the white text.

The second principle I applied was alignment. I decided to base the placement of objects in a layout I had seen in a magazine. It had 2 pictures, with a bigger picture under it, and another two of the small pictures.  You can see this in my design as I have the objective in a wide box, while the objects below it are half as wide and fit perfectly under it. I also made sure that the document had a evenly spaced border around it. I also spaced the objects on the space evenly from each other. These elements combined allowed for a great alignment.

Using what I learned about type from both books, I decided to pick a sans serif font. In keeping with my game related theme, I decided to pick a font called Futura. The sans serif font was great in my game related resume because it feels kind of futuristic. Because many of the video games I play are based either in the future or in science fiction, any font besides a sans serif would have looked bad. Futura worked great because it consisted of perfectly straight lines, and reminded me of the Helvetica style “plain” fonts I find in games like that.

Something that I did in my re design but don’t have a category for is the use of a 3d effect. The four bottom objects had the 3d effect applied to them. The effect took the outer edge and used it to lift them upward, toward the center of the page. This effect makes the objects look wrongly shapen at first glance, but upon the closer inspection, it looks like the objects are held in the 3d space eminating from the page.