Fourth Week cont.

Ockham's Razor asserts that simplicity is preferred to complexity in design. This principle, named after William of Ockham, a 14th Century Franciscan friar and logician, and described on page 142 in Lidwell, can be applied to almost any design. And while I do agree that simple designs work best in many instances, including web and print design, I do gravitate toward aniques, flowers and plants and other items to decorate my home.

I never really was a fan of the "minimalist" home. Sure, everyone likes clean, straight lines and neutral colors, but who wants to live in a cold, untouched, boring and sterile environment?

Minimalist home

I appreciate houses that are a little more rustic and have lots of character; ones that are decorated with pillows and soft fabric, contain lots of greenery, and showcase built-in bookshelves and small, cozy rooms. A cottage on the lake with a porch sounds ideal.

My 'pretend' second home in Florida

Fourth Week

The storytelling topic on page 186 of Lidwell struck a cord with me this week. In the last few months I have been addicted to the "digitally storytelling" of This American Life, a Chicago Public radio podcast. The themed stories each week "are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations. Things happen to them. There are funny moments and emotional moments and moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things about it all."

Read more about This American Life.

Social Engineering was the the most recent This American Life podcast I listened to. The episode unfolds with Daniel Canada and Gregory Deloatch (above), two homeless poets in NYC.

Third Week cont.

In Lidwell's text it discusses Baby-Faced Bias, a tendency to see people and things with baby-faced features as more naive, helpless and honest than those with mature faces. I never really considered this idea, but it does hold some truth.

I have two red-haired women posted below. Obviously one is older than the other, but they do have distinct features - one resembles a baby face with round features and the later one has a more mature face with a stronger bone structure and a less rounded face.

Baby Face (conveys innocence, honest, helplessness)

Mature Face (conveys expertise and authority)

In Lidwell's text, it also discusses Waist-to-Hip Ratio, a preference for a particular ratio of waist size to hip size in men and women. Studies show that people favored males with a .90 waist-to-hip ratio and women with a .70 ratio. I took the test on page 207 and I agreed with the male rendering, but I didn't choose the most popular female rendering based on the waist-to-hip ratio theory.

I did a little more research on the subject and found even more encouraging news for curvier women, considering I have a .73 waist-to-hip ratio. We are smarter, too.

Are Curvier Women Smarter?

Third Week: Fun with Monotone and Duotone Colors

For most of my adult career I have worked in education or non-profit industries. (I guess you could say that education is non-profit.) And because each field had little financial resources, I needed to be creative when designing brochures and other print materials. The companies I worked for didn't have the money to print glossy, four-color informational pieces. Instead, black and white and two- and three-colored images were used often.

As stated in chapter 7 of Williams, you don't always have to create pieces using all of the colors of the rainbow. You can use monocromatic colors - a color composed of one hue with any other of its cooresponding shades or tints.

I have created my own examples to show the differences of applying one and two colors to a black and white photograph.

Black & White Photograph (one color used - black)

Monochromatic Colored Photograph (one color -brown; R=153, G=102, B=0)

Duotone Colored Photograph (two colors - black and red; Red was R=200, G=0, B=0)

Second Week cont.

Enhancing the usability of design was the category of study this week in Lidwell's book. The title that caught my attention was "Inverted Pyramid." It brought a smile to my face because I am constantly preaching to my public relations students how important is it to write in the inverted pyramid style. Up to this point in most college student's lives, they are writing research papers or opinion pieces -- long paragraphs, citations, 25 pages in length, etc. GET TO THE POINT!

At work and when I teach public relations I focus on including the most important information about the story in the first paragraph. This includes the who, what, where, when, why and how. In my job I am mostly writing for the web or writing press releases to pitch stories to the media. The name of the game is to be short, concise and express the most important information at the beggining of the story because you don't have much time to grab the reader's attention. As our lives become more and more hectic, we sometimes only have a minute or two to scan headlines or the first paragraph of an article. Sad, but true.

Inverted Pyramid

Second Week

Typfaces, Typefaces and more Typefaces

In chapter's 9, 10, 11 and 14, Willam's book discusses everything typefaces - categories of type, type contrasts, typefaces used in her own book, etc. A central theme about her book is "don't be afraid" to try design elements. With that said she also emphasizes that type (and design) should never inhibit communication.

When designing must one consider what type of typeface to use - oldstyle, modern, slab serif, sans serif, script and decorative. Up to this point I only knew of two types - serif (times new roman, minion) and sans serif (helvetica, arial) But who knew, Willam's has identified six categories. She also discusses type contrasts, which include size (just say 'no' to ALL CAPS), weight, structure, form, direction and color.

Throughout these chapters on typefaces and fonts, she hits home that if you design using two different fonts on the same page, make it exciting by contrasting the fonts.

Example of contrasting typefaces used in a logo

First Week cont.

My "Universal Principles of Design" book was delivered yesterday evening. I read through the first section of elements and I want to expand on color more, specifically saturation of color (described on page 38-39). As stated in the book, saturation refers to the amount of gray in a hue. As it increases, the amount of gray decreases.

I created an example from my own photo collection to illustrate saturation. Yes, that's me.

This is my original photo.


Manipulated Photo

Details: This photo had the saturation taken low (not to zero since there is a little color.) Before I removed most of the color I selected a 'hot pink' tone from one of the flowers with the eye dropper tool in Gimp (similar to Photoshop). After I lowered the saturation on the whole photo I used the lasso tool to select the middle rose. I then filled the 'hot pink' color in the selection area using the paint bucket with the screen mode and a 22 percent opacity.

First week

I've heard of Robin Williams (and not the goofy, hairy guy in movies) before. This Robin is a female and her book, "The Non-Designer's Book" is quite good. I'm thinking about using it in one of my classes in the future. Robin hit the nail right on the head when she said after finding the Joshua Tree when she was a kid, she noticed it everywhere. I can say the same thing about print stuff. I notice and detest pixelated and skewed images on the web and in print on a daily basis. I am very conscious of this atrocity that lingers throughout many amateur sites and on homemade posters.

The four principles of good design in chapters 1-6 -- contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity -- make sense to me and will be easy to remember when creating my next layout. Robin's simple, multiple illustrations of how you can take a so-so design and make it more visually appealing with just some minor changes is genius. She focuses on straight lines, illustrations and type to convey clear communication on paper -- newsletters, advertisments, business cards or letterhead.

A few of my favorite tips that she mentions in the first six chapters are to provide clear communication rather than try to make a piece fun, or "dancing." It's so true that simple design is better. I also liked the chapter on repetition. Her example of how you can bold the name at the top of a business card and bold the phone number at the bottom to draw the eye up and down instead of off the paper is something I never considered. I am going to try it in some design pieces down the road.

I'd like to comment on the other book, but due to Amazon.com's lazy ways I am still waiting for it to arrive in the mail. 11 days and still waiting :-(