A hard training on eyes… materials: color aid paper packet, scissors/exacto knife, cutting mat, white paper, glue
The gray scale is 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9.5. Now I picked 6 for each value. The light in the room and the digital camera seem distorted the values somehow.
Much of this exercise is about having confidence in what you see rather than what you think is happening.
After this training, the color IQ test here is rather easy.
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Good graphic design is always clear in its visual hierarchy, in which important elements are emphasized and content is organized logically and predictably. A hierarchy in a graphic design can be generated by the page layout, size of the elements, contrast, color, shape, position and so on.
Hierarchy is a very important part to form a good design work. Usually we want the element representing the most important information to be the first in hierarchy. This could be the headline text in bold, with strong contrast color to the background, or an interesting image with big size, saturated color or unusual shape to be appealing to the eyes. Elements on top level of hierarchy are to give the audience a summary or principle concept of the message that the design is trying to express. Then the secondary level elements are in the supporting role to give more details or explanations for the headline information. Overall, to achieve a successful design with appropriate hierarchy, we need to be aware of the readers’ expectation and habits. Elements are supposed to be ordered in a logic hierarchy with pleasing visual balance as well. Only then, the message in the design work can be conveyed smoothly and clearly to the audience.
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The poster I designed for a famous bay area farm - Hidden Villa Farm.
The fonts I used reinforced the intent of the poster. Type is used to its extremes; I also set up contrast between the sizes and weights of the type on the page. I had various options to visualize the concept with type. The type interprets the message visually, it isexaggerated, and contrasted with the intent of the verbal message. The message is repeated, and I mixed typefaces for emphasis.
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sketching, pencil and charcoal
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Jared Spool is indeed a user experience expert with knowledgeable and in-depth insight of consumer oriented industry and web design. In this impressively interesting featured talked, he revealed those hidden secrets in Amazon that made it so successful. It all started from the amazing reviews of this currently available Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz. Take a look at the reviews at the bottom of this product, which is even not available now. You will feel it’s so amazing that so many people are just sticky, addicted and constantly contributing to Amazon. Here is some data to show how attractive this website is: The number of visitors in December 2008 is 71,431,000, rank of all website in traffic is 8; Revenue in 2008 is $19,166,000,000, which is 29% increase over 2007. So why is that? Here are some highlights of the Jared Spool’s talk:
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User Interface conference is a widely recognized conference organized by UIE Jared Spool once every year. It covers the biggest issues in the world of design, gives workshops, seminars in the perspective of usability, user testing, information architecture, persona, etc.
New technique for creative ideas is a full day workshop by Leah Buley, an experience designer in Adaptive Path. The workshop used an interactive way to gave us a full new perspective to fast design creating, sharing and exploring.
So here comes this great practice of sketchboards, which fixes the wrongs in wireframes.
Sketchboards
• Avoids unnecessary detail (so you don!t waste time documenting what you haven’t yet decided on)
• Reveals the best of multiple solutions (so you can be sure that you!re moving forward with the right design, not just the first design that comes to mind)
• Gets everyone!s input and buy-in (so the design can move forward with many supporters)
3 Types of Sketch:
- Icons and symbols add another level of meaning to text - they’re like visual summaries, or bullet points.
- Environment sketches give context to an idea by showing the user’s perspective - bringing in real people to your sketches can be a powerful orienting tool.
- Interaction sketches. They let you figure out how your idea works on the page, and then communicate that to other people.
sketching tools/supplies:
1-up and 6-up template, highlighter, sharpie markers - fat, regular and small, grey marker, sticky notes, scissors, tapes, etc.
Phases of sketching:
- ideation: e.g. coming up with lots of ideas
- big picture thinking: e.g. how to structure sketchboards
- collaborative critique: how to get the group to say the hard stuff
Case study - Sweet Potato, a dinning, cooking, diet iphone application oriented to healthy life
There are a number of products and web sites that cover aspects of what Sweet Potato
will cover. The Daily Plate from Livestrong helps you see the nutritive value of what you!re eating. But compared to the savory, life affirming experience of eating a nutritious meal, counting calories with the Daily Plate seems boring. We want to design a product that feels like more than just a calorie counter.
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How can you use text, images, and color together to create a strong visual communication solution?
Text, images and color are the three important elements for graphic design. And they are the tools designers use to create visual communication solutions.
Images are usually used as the element in the first glance. It can be the part that creates some interesting and appealing visual effects to attract audiences’ attention.
Text is used to convey direct message of the design work. Text can create styles as well, by it’s font, position, size etc. When the audiences look further into the work, text will be the elements that he/she is looking for to find the details of the information. However, when they look into the text, they still have the impression that the image left to them. They read the text with their expectation from the image. If the text message is within the expectation, they will read further and further to go through the design and get all the information that the design work want to convey. However, if text message is off their expectation, they will leave the design work right away. This tells us that elements in design have to be consistent in style, look and feel to create a clear message to the readers.
Color supports the design to create a style and the consistency principle applies to it as well. Consistency basically integrates all the elements to create a united design. Just to remember good visual communication needs the graphic elements strongly group together.
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water color painting
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Geogia O’keeffe is famous for her vibrant colorful paintings, mostly flowers, landscape, objects in nature… No one can be untouched when looking at O’keeffe’s paintings. Ansel Adams is a great photographer of the nature and wildness. His black and white phtotos are stunningly powerful to express this artist’s insight of the nature. Despite the different styles and two unique ways to capture the essense of natural beauty and the 15-year age gap between these two American’s best-known artists, they developed a lifelong friendship.
The SF MOMA is now having the special exhibition for the art works from the two - Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams, Natural Affinities. It was such an joyful experience for me to be exposed to those precious and inspiring art works. This painter and this photographer have their own distinctive visions of the natural world, yet they share the same admiration to the beauty.
There are also site specific installation and woodcut prints from Ranjani Shettar, an Indian artis; Robert Frank’s “The Americans” photography, that reveals the life of Americans beyond the polished surface; Between Art and Life: the contemporary painting and scupture collection, etc.
If you go to San Francisco, go visit MOMA, it got those amazing exhibitions that you don’t want to miss.
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Papyrus is a contemporary font that has been broadly used in various art works for different types of occassions, due to its neat yet stylish look and great legibility.
The poster is sort of a typography study in Papyrus, merely composed of all letters of the alphabet and some numbers and characters.
More info for the font creator: Chris Costello
Chris Costello graduated from Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie and received an Associates Degree in Commercial Art, in 1979. While in school, he worked at Wambach Communications Group, in Rhinebeck, New York as a part-time graphic designer and was hired full-time after his graduation. During this period of his life, he was also very involved with music and played bass with several bands in the area. He eventually took a chance to follow this dream—he quit his job and joined a rock band that toured the southern U.S.
In 1982, he moved to South Florida to attend the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, an art institute located directly on the beach. He won some awards and two scholarship nominations then decided to take a semester off and work in the field for a while. However, his job was so great, that he just kept on working and never went back.
Chris Costello worked at Group 3hree Advertising in Pompano Beach, doing graphic design, production and illustration. After about a year, he left this full-time position and went back to work for the same company, making twice as much money as a freelancer. He figured this was the way to go, so he hired himself out to ad agencies and design studios throughout South Florida. He liked the freelance idea because he could work on a lot of different projects and still had some time to hang on the beach.
After tiring of his vacation lifestyle, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts and worked for Brewster Advertising in Cambridge as an Art Director. After three years, he felt that he acquired enough experience to go off on his own again, so he left to pursue a career as a freelance illustrator and, a professional bass player. For the next six years, he had the time of his life. During the day, he worked at home, illustrating for high profile book publishers and ad agencies throughout the country. His nights and weekends were spent traveling to resorts and colleges all over New England to play music.
Costello became the Art Director for DPI, a book publisher in Woburn, MA in the year 1995. There, he learned computer graphics, web design, management and all about the publishing industry.
Three years later, he left DPI and became Senior Graphic Designer for The DeWolfe Companies in Lexington, MA. In 2002, Dewolfe was aquired by NRT and merged with Coldwell Banker Hunneman to form Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage where he was promoted to Creative Director in thier marketing department.
In 2003, he recieved a Bachelors Degree in Graphic Design and Visual Communication at Northeastern Universty in Boston.
Chris Costello currently lives in the Boston area with his wife, Anita, and his two daughters, Sheriden and Emersen. He still gets to hang on the beach every now and then… but mostly then.
Designing typefaces is a labor of love for him. After handlettered book and magazine titles for several major publishers, he thought it would be cool to produce complete character sets from some of these designs for all of creatives out there. Except for Letterpress Text, every font is inspired by his own imagination and most are inked by hand before they are digitized.
The complete list of type fonts that Chris Costello designed is as follows:
Blackstone, Blackstone Italic, Letterpress Text, Letterpress Text Italic, Letterpress Text Bold, Letterpress Text Bold Italic, Mirage, Papyrus, Virus, Virus Lethal
Chris Costello created the font Papyrus in 1983. This unusual roman typeface merges effectively the elegance of a traditional roman letterform with the hand-crafted look of highly skilled calligraphy. It includes an extra set of initialing capitals to enhance its unique style.
Papyrus is part of the Linotype Library. Papyrus is a trademark of Esselte Letraset Limited.
The font Papyrus can be downloaded at:
http://www.linotype.com/14649/papyrusregular-font.html
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© Songinwind Creative 2009
