Late - 2/13 Blog Post

Page design-
What is it? Page design helps a user/reader of a document understand what is being conveyed. It is a combination of text, visuals, headings, and much more that is utilized in order to convey that message, what ever it is. It allows an easy movement on the eye, and if done correctly will relax a user while reading. Kimball and Hawkins discuss the “three perspectives on Pages” which are perception, culture, and rhetoric. All three are very important principles that all designers must think about before thinking about how their page will be viewed by the user. This then led’s into thinking about how our users will view our pages and if they will skim, scan, or read. This is where designing comes into play.
As Kimball and Hawkins start on page 120, you want meaning in your pages. You need to be able to make your user have a connection with your design. What is the rational for the user to look at your page? Then we get into sequence, patterning, Z pattering. Order. We then need to make sure we utilize our power zones in order to capture the users attention and then most importantly keep our users on the page. We want our users coming back ultimately.
Kimball and Hawkins go into talking about design elements. We have been discussing these elements for the past couple of weeks in class. It is always important to keep these topics in mind in order to not fall behind.
Onto the menu design that Kala and I worked on for re/design 2 that was posted on Thursday. I actually enjoyed working in a group on this design. It worked out well, which normally is not how I feel when working with other people. Kala had an idea and we just sat down and started designing. Anyways, we were trying to keep it simple, but add in a little culture. We knew that we wanted to use black and white as our contrast, but add in a little elegance as well. The elephant was used because it is the national animal of Thailand. We used bamboo to add to the perception and to add borders on the inside pages, as well as the back page. We separated items according to how they were separated in the original design from Bangkok but added spacing to ease the eyes of the users. The back page was somewhat hard to space out because there was so much content, but I believe that we where able to separate the descriptions and the dishes well.
We used Photoshop on this design because Kala has more experience with the program than Indesign. Normally I would of done this in Indesign, but it still worked out well in Photoshop. We used the grid option to make sure our alignments were the same. I cannot stress on how much the grids help while designing things. I hope we discuss more about the use of grids later in class.