Late - 3/6 Blog Post

Information found at the following URL:

http://www.depts.ttu.edu/communications/identityguidelines/idguidelines/ttu/elements/type.php.

I am not surprised that Texas Tech University has such a strict enforcement of what kinds of typography can be used when publishing things whether in print and or on the internet. TTU is a brand that stretches all across the globe and that brand needs to be consistent with all documents. It shows order, sustainability, and most importantly a center of higher education that cares about what is being published. You will see the same kind of strict enforcements in most centers of higher education, business, and non-profits around the world. It allows a voice to be heard, or in the topic of document design, a voice that can be seen.

Lets get into what Texas Tech uses as founts and why they have chosen these specific founts. When we first go to the identity guideline page for typography, link provided above, Charter is defined. We read that the use of this fount has three reasons.

1. “key concept of fostering success, we chose a highly readable Charter to represent our primary voice”
2. “reinforces the same classical associations we recognize in our campus architecture, forms that evoke a sense of history, integrity and trust”
3. “highly versatile typeface that's appropriate for a variety of applications from formal to casual”

Now that is a lot to take in, just from one use of a fount. Knowing that Texas Tech does not do anything with out research, the office of communication and marketing probably spent thousands of dollars finding out that Charter voices the above three concepts through market research and focus groups. Full circle, it works very well to define that voice of Texas Tech University. The office of communication and marketing even go into how to use Charter in headlines and body text, noting that only a few abstract changes can be made depending on the document that is being made. They also note that users outside the university system might not have the fount Charter installed on their own personal computers and that Times New Roman can be used instead, but in the same character style. I also noticed that they want headlines to be in a gray color tone, in order to voice a friendly nature in communication. I have never noticed the use of this gray fount, but will now have a keen eye to notice this type of voice in documents that are produced at Texas Tech.

The next fount that can be used within the University system is Helvetica Neue. Helvetica is used in everything we see due to its easy nature of reading. The identity guideline website says that Helvetica Neue is a “definitive sans serif font, with a classic neutrality that allows it to be used for all types of communication.” Having watch a documentary film about Helvetica in a past Mass Communication class, I noticed the use of it in many documents around Texas Tech. The communication and marketing office even go to the degree that Helvetica should be used for sub headlines, as well as information in charts and graphics. It can also be noted that Helvetica can be substituted with the use of Arial fount with the colors of red, black, or gray.

Edwardian is the last fount that is listed on the site as a usable form when producing documents under Texas Tech University. It is to be used for formal announcements and invitations. This makes sense, because our culture has seemed to connect cursive type as formal writing. Edwardian has a specific voice and is used correctly under our University system.

Side Note on cursive writing:
This is something I struggled with when I was growing up. I was taught in my private school to write everything in cursive no matter what. When I made the switch to the public school system (8th Grade), the complete opposite was taught. I understand the need for the switch because print type is much easier to read than cursive type. I do not like that the cultural mind set on cursive type is for formal voices. It seems ridiculous to me, and sometimes I even find my self switching from cursive and print type when writing notes in class.

I would not change anything about what the office of communication and marketing has put forth on its usage of typography. As I noted above, the university probably spent thousands of dollars finding out the right founts in order to voice the needs of the University System. Why change something if it works well? These above three founts work very well in my opinion.

Due 3/3/2011

For re/design number three, I decided to go ahead and make an informational flyer for the collegiate chapter of the Association of Fund Rising Professionals. AFP, Texas Tech is a new student organization on campus and we are trying to get the word out about the benefits of joining.

The text on this document is from the national AFP organization that is given to all collegiate chapters to gain the attention of students that are not part of the organization already. I decide to make the text in the main document the same color as the text in the national AFP logo in order keep the document consistent and not confuse the users mind with too much color. I used sub headers with a larger size text to indicate section breaks of information. I then deiced to bold the website URL, which has yet to be determined by the officers of the chapter. The bold text is used to make sure that the reader will be able to find the information easily if they wanted to find out more about our chapter. In this day in age, people will want to research a website in order to find more information. When the website information is hard to find, you start to lose credibility and interest in what you are trying to convey. I also decided to put the url under the contact section of the flyer, next to our presidents contact information because the two are closely related for our users needs. I did not want to use normal bullets for the reasons on why someone should join, so I took the advice from non-designers handbook that said to use a text under windings as bullets, instead of a normal circle or dash. All the text, except the url, is aligned to the left in each section. The information in each section is bumped over a few pixels to add to the separation of information.

I wanted to keep this design clean and simple because this is a national organization and adding to much flash takes away from the credibility of the mission and values in AFP. I also had in mind that we are a new organization on campus, and thus we do not have much funds to put towards printing a lot of ink. Saying this, I still did add in some color. As you can see, the main information in the document is bordered by two blue lines, but leaves white space on both the top and bottom. This also adds to the separation of information in the document as a whole. To enhance the separation of information I also added in gold lines on the top and on the left of each section. I left an opening in the top left corner of these lines to make it easier on the eyes. I did not want my users to be to confine in the document. I believe these opening allow easy movement across the document.

On to the two logos I used. I had to do some secondary research in order to not break any laws. From what I found, I do not believe I broke any rules on both the AFP logo and the Tech logo. When a user sees this document they will be drawn to the tech logo first for a reason. This is for the Texas Tech chapter of AFP and I want students of Texas Tech to understand that. This is the reason I put the double two in the middle of the document. I did not like that there is more space between the tag line of Texas Tech and the AFP logo, but due to constraints of Texas Techs logo, I could not change the spacing. I made the AFP logo bigger in size to imply that this is flyer for the AFP organization, but under a student organization at Texas Tech.

Gutenberg press blog

The Gutenberg press is a machine that changed everything in a sense of history and we are still seeing the affects of what it means culturally today. To understand how the press still affects us today, we have to glance into why it became such an important part of our history. The press allowed an opening of knowledge to the common person. An information highway that gave people the power of reading at a cheap cost. With the invention of the press, the tool of reading became a usable resource in everyday life. Like anything new, it took years for the tool to reach the masses, but it happened. You no longer had to be part of the clergy or the crown to have what was basically the starting point of educating the masses.

Now lets go back to what I mean by power of reading, or the power of the press. Think about not being able to read through a day in your adult life. Could you make it? I’m sure we all could, but would you rather use a hammer to put a nail through something, or a rock, what about a drill? The invention of the press allowed the masses a means of circulating thoughts and ideas that were individualized and could now be read by more than one class of society. A tool that when thought about, caused revolutions, educated millions, and changed medieval society into the begging’s of what we have today. With the invention of the Gutenberg press, later and later models kept coming out, each with an advantage over the last. The evolution of the press kept on changing, trying to keep up with the population. Eventually this evolution gave us the means in history to start printed book libraries, schools for the common societal classes, and the ability of expanding knowledge in our culture. These are only a few examples of hundreds that the press allowed to become conceptualized through the years.

In today’s United States culture, owning and reading printed materials are considered a basic essential tool of life, one that is granted to anyone that is willing to be educated. Now I know that is a huge generalization, and there are Americans that are illiterate, but I am talking about the majority of the population in the United States. Anyways, how does the invention of the press still affect our culture? Well, we have to think about it on a timeline. As I already mentioned, the evolution of the press started becoming larger and larger. Culture shifted again with the invention of the computer into the Internet, which became popular. The masses wanted more, and like printed books, the Internet was profitable in the eyes of entrepreneurs. Information is at our fingertips, through our computers, and now our phones.

The comparison I’m trying to make is that printed materials were in fact the Internet for society in the past. But unlike handwritten books, which died out with the invention of the press, printed material is still used in everyday life. We have not reach a point in our society where all printed materials are thoughts from the past. They still have meaning, can carry an abundance of information, and many people still prefer reading printed material. All this information that we are now able to gain and read from multiple mediums are all connected to the invention of the Gutenberg press. Without it, where would we be as a society now? It is impossible to answer that question, but possible to think about what it could be, for better or worse.

These two photos are an example of what I did this weekend. Although these are from last week, the photos still composes what I did this week...Disc Golf on the weekend. These are out in Mackenzie park. I really enjoy the second one because it captures not only the people in the photo, put the disc itself which is in focus.

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.

Due 2/10 (Created with Kala Taylor)

The above four images are like a 4 page book. The two center images will open up, and the last image is the back of the menu.

When designing our menu for the Bangkok Thai Restaurant we instantly knew that we wanted to emphasize culture. We then searched and downloaded the Thai land font “Pad Thai” to include as our main font within the menu’s title and subtitles. Because we felt this font was harder to read the smaller it got we made the decision to use an alternate Bangkok font, “Silom”, for the menu’s actual description. Although the font might not be identifiable to most, the name is very identifiable to those of Thai culture as it is one of the most well known streets in Bangkok. We also wanted to make it clear that when creating this menu that although it has Thai emphasis, it was created for the American audience. We show this through our simplistic color and design theme. We also right-aligned the text on the cover to constitute what we have learned through Robin Williams, which is: Even though right alignment can cause the title and subtitles to be distant there is still a visual connection between the two elements. Our mindset behind the use of more than one bamboo on the cover was to implement depth. Often, depth is eliminated in design and unfortunately so, as it is one of the most visually intriguing concepts. The bamboo on the cover also gives an element of proximity. In this area of design the eyes are enthralled by the two visually similar objects placed in close proximity within each other. To add proximity, and to add to the visual intrigue we included an elephant, which is Thai land’s national animal.

Although we right aligned the cover page for visual captivation, we decided to keep the actual items and descriptions within the menu left aligned. We did this as to not confuse our American target audience. We chose to keep the text aligned and consistent; we did not want to overwhelm our audience with multiple fonts, colors, or schemes. We took into account that most Americans skim and scan text so we indented the descriptions from the titles of the menu items as to appeal to a quicker find for the audience. We used repetition through the art scheme of the bamboo sticks to take the eyes towards the titles within the menu. We also used repetition with the bamboo sticks within the menu but they are vaguely shown so that we are not taking away from the context of the menu’s descriptions. Contrast is an obvious element as the use of black and white are executed. Black and white creates the highest contrast possible. Also a pure green has a very large contrast with black as well. We wanted to stay concise with our document so we were sure to use the same approach throughout our menu, we feel through our consistency and positive versus negative spacing we have eliminated ambiguity. Everything on our menu was created with a purpose, whether it was to add depth through art, or limit our font sizes to 4 and our font styles to only 2. We thought of perception of the audience and we wanted to eliminate that Gestalt rule of common fate in which the expected colors are red and probably poor design. We wanted to give a mental transaction or interaction within our audience’s minds of simplicity, cleanliness, and a sense of Thai land Americanized.

Three Concepts

From what we have read in both texts, I really enjoyed Kimball/Hawkins chapter three. I enjoy reading and learning about theories because theories are not set in stone. They can change and be manipulated depending on the circumstance. In document design the same thought can be attributed to designs that seem to break all the “rules” (theories), but still seem to work within the specific target audience. It intrigues me to think out side the “box” and to take chances because this is how advancements happen. Now I am not saying I am an advancer in anyway, but thinking outside the box allows a creative side that I believe more people should embrace in them selves. Once again I am getting off on a tangent so, lets get to the three concepts that caught my attention the most from chapter three.

Concept one – Grouping –

Grouping catches my mind the most because it is a concept that is not really thought about at the conscious level when looking at a design. Grouping allows the mind to relax while looking at a design, allowing the eyes to have an ease of flow through a document. There are four topics that are discussed under the grouping section, as followed: proximity, similarity, continuation, and common region. Although these four topics are cited as laws, they are still important aspects that can change or influence other theories.

Concept two – Ecological Perception –

Under ecological perception we come across some very interesting terms. First is Affordance, or “the qualities of an object that allow us to use them.” Second is usability, the study of how a user interacts with an object and or product. I like to think about affordance because, as I’ve said before, we tend to not think about how products work. We know how products work though because of affordance and the ability of the human mind to do without thinking, or theorized by thinking with the unconscious mind. This then brings in the notion of usability. How can a product be useful and designed in order to take account of affordance and the ability of the mind to act on impulse “without much thought?” Our mind is trained to recognize things that are easy to use in order to not over flow the ability to make conscious decisions. A user will become unenthused to use a product if the product requires too much thought. Usability allows us to understand what works for us/users, and what doesn’t work for us/users when using a product. If we as designers understand these concepts when designing something, you will be able to save time and money.

Concept three – Theories on visual culture -
Visual culture fascinates me because our visual sense is so powerful. What is taught and comprehended in one culture might mean something completely different in another that fascinates me the most. Visual culture conveys a whole wide range of identities that can change from one place to another. For instance when an American see’s the colors red, white, and blue, most will think of our country values and reasoning of the United States. If the same colors are seen in another culture those American values and thoughts of reasoning are not conveyed in the same way. They view the color scheme in a completely different way. It is important to understand these differences in cultures when you are trying to reach users that cross visual cultural boundaries. As a designer you do not want to offend the people you are trying to capture, in most cases at least.