I’m always interested in other aspects and disciplines of design. Although design as a whole is vast I can see there are similarities between disciplines and process.
The other day I found an interesting review site called Red Letter Media. What sets this review site apart from other is the way the reviewer (with a little bit of humour attached) breaks down the movie stage by stage. He explains why a movie works, through character development, what emotion the movie evokes. What really impresses me is he doesn’t say bad or good things about the movie without reason. This reminds me of what we were taught while learning design.
An example is to do with “Disney Eyes”. He explains characters with wide eyes are more identifible and gain the audience’s sympathy due to look that they have nothing to hide. Where are characters with beady looking eyes are less likely to gain the audience’s sympathy due to looking like they have something to hide. This is all true and can be backed up in People Watching by Desmond Morris
He explains in one review that sometimes movie makers forget that they should aim to envoke an emotion, an aspect that I have to remember when designing. As designers we sometimes forgot we are trying to get a reaction out of people not to make things look pretty.
I really appreciate the time and effort this person has put into these reviews. Not only are they humourous but go into great detail! I’ve embedded the first part of the review. For the 2nd part if you are still interested go to his website.
While at tafe I never really had a good look at youtube videos, something I regret doing now. I have found some videos to be a great resource in understanding and remembering the fundementals of design.
Below is a video of interaction design which has been broken down into 3 parts. I found this easy to understand and will build on this knowledge.
There are a million ways to interact with products. The company mobile art lab have combined an old technology that users are familiar with, with a new technology the iphone. This allows for a interaction with books on a whole new level. A book no longer becomes static, the book allows interactive explanations for methods and theorys.
Currently the technology is being developed for children’s books but could have multiple uses in the near future. I’m excited by this type of technology and hope to see more of it in the future.
It’s Christmas time again and to my surprise I found an online advent calender for graphic designers. Instead of chocolate there are articles which include web design.
There are some great articles on this site that are worth having a look at. Some posts move back to the basics of web design but I feel that it’s important to remember that sometimes less is more. Not all articles are design related some talk about the importance of coding a site. One of the hardest things to do as a web designer is to keep in mind what the code can do while designing.
It’s worth having a look at, and some articles in the years before are still relevant today.
10/GUI is the latest interface making the rounds on the internet
A fairly interesting and daring concept from this student, it will be interesting to see if it gets made. Probably not the best solution for everyday users of computers but for full on internet and programmers it’s a dream (from what I’ve heard from programming friends).
My criticisms is the learning time for such a new interface and the linear desktop. However new users introduced to the mouse for the first time had a fair bit of learning time themselves. The linear desktop would not scale well on a traditional interface due to the sizes of different applications.
Take a look at what you think, personally I’m excited by the idea of this interface. So you could say I like it.
Earlier this week I found an article on the web designer’s depot on Jakob Nielsen.
Jakob Nielsen along with Donald Norman are considered to be experts within the web usability field.
It’s an interesting article on Jakob Nielsen’s current thoughts on web usability. I found it quite useful and will use it in my future web design developments.
I found the concerns about web usability today quite interesting. When Jakob Nielsen started out, it was in the days of 28.8kbps. I believe because we are in the age of ADSL people are less likely to hang around for a response on a webpage. I tend to think of it like art you have 30 seconds to impress someone, the time is cut down to 1 second with web design.
I suggested people read this article and frequently visit his site to gain more hints on web usability.
Donald Norman’s books Emotional Design and The Design of Everyday things are a good read. I suggest anyone planning on getting into design to have a read of them.
I found a fairly interesting site the other day which could be useful for future reference. While the site focuses on the management and design side of web development which is a rarity throughout my research.
He goes on about the employability skills as well time management skills. He also shows basic princpals on the gestalt and layout. What makes this site useful is the examples he uses in real web design.
I found this site fairly useful and interesting, I suggest other students have a look, even if you know the basics it’s never too late to freshen up on them.
Logo lounge is a resource for various logos from different companies. I found this to be a fairly good resource when designing my logo (which is going through another iteration). I suggest all students have a look at this site at some point in their design career.
I came across an interesting site the other day that I thought was worth sharing. Coltex I believe is a Japanese advertising company (please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). I found their site on FWA and I was struck on how unusual the navigational system is.
Instead of using a conventional navigation with hierarchy they have opted to use a story telling navigation. I found this to be quite interesting but also universal. I understood without any words what I was looking at and how it was meant to play out. This site definitely goes against the archetype of interface design.
However when saying that I found a few things wrong with the site which could be annoying in the long run. There is no real navigational structure where you can go back and forth. You have to go where the interface takes you. Which can be confusing and annoying.
The site itself is beautiful and would be nice to see it translate into a western audience.
For my essay I was asked to research intuition, I came across the website for affective design. It has some great essays on how to meet a positive emotion for the end user. As designers it’s always important for us to consider the end user and what mindset we will invoke. Without the end user there would be no product for us to design.
While products are meant to be functional we should always consider the emotion. This site is a great resource for understanding emotional design. They also reference cognitive sciencetist such as Donald Norman.
