« September 2007 | Main | November 2007 »
October 25, 2007
meshing in Ai
I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to use Ai meshes, and I think I have finally started to get the hang of it. It isn't pretty and I still need to do a lot more work to get anything near decent.. Can I submit a version.. 2?
Posted by Addie at 01:27 AM | Comments (0)
October 04, 2007
Maeda and Me
Although his writing style is pretty terrible, I agreed with just about everything Maeda wrote. In fact, most of it seemed like common sense or the kinds of conclusions one would come to were one to think about the design of technology in any superficial sense. I guess I wanted more from Maeda. Yes, I know that VCRs in the 80s were WAY too hard to program and that they hid a lot of buttons behind little doors. I KNOW that the remote control for my DVD player is a horrendous beast with about 23 buttons I will never use and if I looked at it hard enough, I would realize that the curves on my Lenovo actually do make it looks smaller and thinner than it is. In fact, I've admired those curves lovingly from time to time.
I want Maeda to talk about how design is transitioning which I believe involves user customization. The idea of customizing tennis shoes or web applications is now a reality vs. something like the iPhone whose simplicity supposes to have reached its teleological conclusion and doesn't let the user rework its captivating design. In other words, tell me something I don't know Maeda. Go past the superficialness of design and get more philisophical in analysis.
Posted by Chris at 05:22 PM | Comments (0)
Future Tense Nostalgia
This is the first class assignment that we didn't have time to show in class: http://www.ex-nihilo.net/images/future_tense_nostalgia_large.jpg
-cj-
Posted by Chris at 05:19 PM | Comments (0)
Tufte 2.0
I think Tufte is great in a lot of ways. He's an example of one of those "ah-ha" moments in life where he made me really look at the world in a completely different way than ever before. I love his ideas of how understandable visualizations can yield multivariate data. But all of his forms and forms he analyzes are very static. Designing in the Photoshop or web age can utilize many of his ideas certainly, but ultimately will require a much more sophisticated paradigm. One that involves user interactions, data dynamics, and the concept of on-demand. If data is dynamic, you don't necessarily HAVE to show multivariate data in all its forms up front. Instead you can design in ways to empower users to solicit their own subsets of data. But the concept of design unafraid to provide lots of data because it is smartly designed is still an intellectual legacy of which Tufte should be proud.
Posted by Chris at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)
Subtraction
Tufte's chapter was interesting. I was especially drawn to the idea of subtraction and its role in visual and literary forms. That subtraction of weight plays a chief role in illuminating a form, or areas of it, is to be expected. Yet I'd never considered that it could play a part in symbolism, as seen in the comparison of the 1748 Nolli map of Rome with the redesign in which the river encoding is muted.
The excerpt from Calvino's "Invisible Cities" was interesting to read in light of this. I find his stories alluring but difficult to talk about, yet it's possible to get a very good sense of the subtraction of weight from them.
Posted by Dominique at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)
Review: Envisioning Information Ch. 3: Layering and Separation
Tufte's insights on layering really underlined the importance of subtlety in information display. The weights of lines between data content and the supporting structure become a factor that must be balanced. I really identified with his examples of tables, which are deceptively difficult to design. Designing a few rows alone can look very different than designing for large numbers of rows. I have used his advice on use of subtle colors and lighter lines in my own designs.
I also liked the 1+1=3 concept described by Tufte. This third element of the negative space can be used to help the design instead of distract from the design. The historical examples that Tufte uses are rich and descriptive. They helped with comparing how the eye processes data displays with different weights of lines.
Posted by Thomas at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)
October 03, 2007
Posted by Addie at 11:24 PM | Comments (0)
Posted by Hatti at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)
Envisioning Information
The text we read about layering and separation I found very insightful in certain areas. I liked most the portion on mapping that talked about how negative spaces can be just as informative as the dense ones, and in many cases moreso, because they present themselves less complexly than highly dense areas. When I first started designing, it was hard for me to think of positive and negative space as notions that hold each other in their place, rather than colorscapes that merely sit atop a canvas. While I have never been very interested in maps or their mathematical significance, I do appreciate the story-telling aspect that they can convey, and I enjoyed how the reading brought some of these examples to light.
Posted by Hatti at 10:11 PM | Comments (0)
Layering and Seperation with Tufte
Train tables are supposed to be hard to read; that's part of their charm. That being said, I agree with what Tufte says in this reading, though there was little I felt strongly about. Unfortunately the clarity of the chapter seems compromised in xeroxed copies due to loss of color and sharp lines -- while I'm pleased at not being required to buy his book, I think Tufte's strength is largely from his examples, especially in this chapter.
I didn't feel especially strongly about most of the discussion in this chapter; I felt his primary message was that supporting data & visual items included primarily for organization shouldn't overpower the primary data being presented. I suppose that's an idea that I take largely for granted. The most difficult part, I think, is determining what the primary data is and what is necessary to coherently present it. For example, with the hospital bill example, the primary data is the annotation, not the bill itself -- but the annotation is of little use without the bill. After this it is necessary to implement a design which will clearly display the primary & supporting data. I feel at this step Tufte doesn't give a lot of support; he presents examples of easy to read designs and gives little piecemeal recommendations of what to do and what not to do and some categories of operations, but I don't feel he offers any deep insight on how to create good designs.
Still I found this reading to be worthwhile and gave me some ideas on presenting information that I plan to use in the future, primarily just trying to remove as much as possible from an image while maintaining all primary & necessary supporting data.
(And to be honest, his re-design of the cluttered train timetable is a much clearer presentation of the data; I would probably have missed fewer trains in the past number of years if they had been re-designed similarly.)
Posted by Timothy at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)
Unintentional Optical Art
I'm very interested in the serendipitous creation of "optical art" mentioned in the Layering and Separation chapter. The author describes that color, texture, shapes and layers facilitate clear communication, and in their absence "chaotic...unintentional optical art" often emerges. He calls these circumstances a "failure to communicate." I'd say that rather than a failure to communicate, this brand of optical art communicates quite successfully--it just communicates a unique experience that perhaps we are not ready for at that moment. One that in our frustration we're unwilling to accept. The longitude and latitude of a remote town might be lost, but a poignant expression of our chaotic existence shows itself. It's a beautiful that in the midst of solutionless information design, an artistic experience can thrive.
Posted by Sonia at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)
Layering and Separation
The reading that really spoke to me was the chapter entitled Layering and Separation. I found the different train schedules interesting because they're something that I take for granted. It never occured to me that the separation of the data on the schedule made the difference when it came to one's ease at reading them. It seems obvious, but I missed it before. The example on the patient in the hospital was depressing in a couple of ways. Of course, the ending to that part was sad as was the fact that the end of a person's life could be sumarized in a chart of just words and numbers. The total cost exhibited at the end was also depressing.
The part of the chapter that I really liked, though, was the section on 1+1=3. I found that very interesting and actually familiar. Just recently I described a flaw in our numeric system to my nephew and as I did it I drew a picture which, interestingly enough, was very similar to the rectangles displayed in the examples. Indeed, my point to my nephew was that the area in between the rectangles are a space that needs to be counted. What I was describing was the fact that our numeric system is flawed because certain numbers don't match up. For instance, what century is 150 A.D.? Is it the first century or the second? The answer is strange and suprising and it also highlights how space between lines or rectangles or markers of any kind do count.
Posted by Armin at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)
October 01, 2007
Maeda on perceived and actual qualities
After hearing Maeda admit that he didn't quite understand himself at the time he wrote the book, I read the chapter as something that he was still working through.
Still, I haven't read much about design and thought it interesting, particularly where Maeda talks about the perception of quality: "the way something we own feels can change how we feel." He offers a Bang & Olufsen remote control as an example of a design that mixes actual and perceived qualities. The remote is thin, slender, made with fine materials, but heavier than it looks, so as to communicate high quality. This made me think that I always pay attention to a product's weight. This is especially the case when it's part of function, as with cookware. If a pot or pan looks good, is made out of quality materials, and conducts heat, I expect it to be sturdy. If it's marketed as being light, I expect it to be relatively or comparatively light, that is, heavier than it looks, and lighter than the cookware to which it compares in quality--because I don't want it toppling over when I'm cooking.
Posted by Dominique at 11:46 PM | Comments (0)
Review of Maeda S.H.E by Thomas
Maeda offers some simple principles on simplifying an interface. He makes some good supporting points, such as smaller objects generating lower expectations. He also gives good examples of elegant simplicity in technology such as in cell phones and computers. However balancing ease of use with simplicity is exceedingly difficult, especially with complex functionality built into products today. There can be potentially hundreds of functions in today's cell phones, PDA's and digital cameras. Moreover, the complexity gets compounded when these technologies converge into an all-in-one device. Within this setting it is easy to remove a function which is seldom used, but is critical when it is needed. Also, hiding a function too deeply would require the user to know exactly where to find it, i.e. reading the manual. This was only the first chapter of Maeda's book, but I would have liked him to speak more about when and how to apply these principles of simplification. When is it appropriate to reduce, or to hide?
Posted by Thomas at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)