#1301comdes

[ccattqueen]

Design Thinking: A Process

In class there were five specific steps to the design process: discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation, and implementation. While these aren’t hard and fast rules to live by when problem solving or designing, they do cover the bases of how you should start your own process. There are also other things to consider in developing your own design process, like taking a break and stepping away from your projects, using the three H’s, and expanding your process beyond physical design work.

One of the most beneficial things you can do in the early design process sounds like the most counter-productive… stepping away from your work and take a break. Don Draper from the show Mad Men said it best, “Just think about it deeply, then forget it. An idea will jump in your face.” In the book “The Art of Thought” by Graham Wallas, the design process is broken down into four stages, and the second stage is incubation. In the incubation stage, you’ve already gathered as much information about the problem you are trying to solve, and now you’re letting it marinate while you step away for a while. Inspiration can come from doing the most mundane tasks. I personally like to take walks with my dog and get inspired by what’s going on around me. Clearing your mind allows for more creative ideas to flow in!

After you’ve cleared your head, it’s time to come back and use it. In an article for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, designer Richard Grefe writes about the “three H’s” head, heart, and hand and it’s incorporation into modern design work. Using your head is thinking critically and creatively to problem solve. Join creative thinking with empathy and you think of human-centered solutions, then craft that solution with your talent and hand-skills. By engaging all three parts you can maximize your own ideas and skillsets to come up with better solutions to design problems.

In The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design from the designers at IDEO, the design process is enhanced by expanding that process beyond physical design work. Much like Grefe’s recommendation of using your heart in your process, IDEO implements seven mindsets that enhance the process and create a greater human experience through design. These mindsets include empathy, optimism, iteration, creative confidence, making, embracing ambiguity, and learning from failure. Notice how very few of these mindsets involve doing any physical design work. Expanding your process to include real human feeling and emotion makes a greater connection between you, your design, and your client that the design is for, which is an all-around great set up to make a better solution to the original problem.

As you can see, the design process used in class only covers the basics of what we as designers should do to produce design work. Incubating thought, using your head, heart, and hands, and expanding your design process to include emotional responses to the human experience are all great things to include into your own personal design process.

Resources:

Wallas, Graham, The Art of Thought

Grefe, Richard, Head, Heart and Hand: Modern Design Practice https://www.aiga.org/aiga/content/about-aiga/insight/head-heart-and-hand-modern-design-practice/

IDEO, The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design

[noodlesortoodles-blog]

The Domain in Austin Texas has many different found lettering types within it, including: store awnings, street signs, hand painted signs, posters, wall art, etc. For this project I decided to focus specifically on Rock Rose Ave within the Domain, which mostly consists of bars and restaurants. For my concept I decided to collage posters off the walls of Rock Rose. I developed this vernacular type poster by messing around with filters and blending modes to make the colors within it to create some balance together as a cohesive piece. The hierarchy of this composition is the large Rock Rose type at the top of the poster. I left negative space that didn’t contain any text in the top right and bottom left corners to let the eye rest. I integrated the secondary text by bringing the file into illustrator to type on a line so that it goes with the flow of the astronaut helmet. I used bold Calibri in all caps for my type to match the typography in one of the posters. I also used a second font for my theme that is  almost identical to the repetition of text through the poster. I wanted this concept to come off as a nightclub poster, and I think the color palate and space mood reflects that in a way that I wanted.

[noodlesortoodles-blog]

Today in society everything you think is private on the internet isn’t. People are so immersed in their phones that more of their private lives are being displayed on social media and privacy is becoming more public. There is always going to be a shadow of yourself projected through social media that will never go away. Once something is put online it stays there forever. Even if you try to delete a post, there will always be doors people can go through to find that information. In order to portray this private v public concept, I took a picture of myself privately looking at my phone with the eyes of others surrounding me through a dark open door. The hierarchy of the photo is me with secondary eyes viewing the phone. The repetition and value of the eyes create an eerie demeanor towards the photo like people are watching me. I did this by creating masks (that are feathered) of the eyes of close-ups that I scaled down to the size of my eyes to make it proportional.  The eyes come through the negative space I created to look like an open door. I did this with a dark freeform shape around a closet frame that bleeds off the page. The harmonious darkness of the image all comes together as a whole to create a nightmarish mood.

[noodlesortoodles-blog]

After looking at various pictures of animals and design techniques I developed this pictogram system. I decided to chose a lion, elephant, walrus and frilled neck lizard for my animas. After drawing mass amounts of thumbnails and roughs I came up with a system where the “eyes” of the animals connect to another part of the face of the animal. I had many guides so that everything was proportioned correctly. Each of the eyes meet at the same level to create a sense of balance and harmony within the entire pice as a whole. Figuring out the positive and negative space was the most difficult task. I did this with various circles and ovals to create the flow I was looking for. After i got one side down I duplicated and flipped it to the other side, I did this throughout my entire process to make things easier and proportionate. Each of the animals have the same line weight as well to make it all come together as a system.   

[a-s1215]

Dust Jacket

In the book Civilwarland in Bad Decline, George Saunders paints a picture of a theme park based on the civil war and how it is doing poorly. I imagined something along the lines of gravel walkways, wood cabins, and trash astray. I wanted to focus on a scene that I felt was the climax: when a hand gets cut off and buried in the dirt on the grounds. I emphasized the pile of dirt and pushed it to be in the foreground with brighter and more saturated colors. I made the display text integrate with the imagery by partially burying it behind the pile yet in front of the shovel. I wanted there to be a lot of texture and darkness to give off the understanding that it is a dark and gritty book itself. The colors in this are also complimentary (blue and orange), making it aesthetically pleasing to look at.

[a-s1215]

Creative Book

I interviewed with Carol Baudin, a field nurse/RN. Carol believes that to truly heal you have to find the root of the problem, not just medicate your side effects, or in other words holistic healing. Something she emphasizes on is making sure the patient is at a point of homeostasis/a balance between their mental, spiritual, and physical health and by taking the steps to get there. Carol says the best thing you can do for yourself is to begin today taking care of your body and mind now so tomorrow you will be better than today. With that in mind, she told me some ways to take care of yourself is to eat right, take vitamins/medicine when you need it, go outside and be active, and being kind mentally and spiritually to yourself. I wanted to reflect her ideas by creating a cover that looked a bit natural and rustic by dying it with tea, using twine to bind, and using brown fonts. I wanted the images to reflect the textures, colors, shapes and sizes of healing methods both natural and modern medicine and how the two can be similar and different and enhance them in their own ways.

[a-s1215]

Headline Interpretation

In a consumerist society, we often value what we are able to purchase more than the people around us. In the article "Money Talks," it sheds light on how we allow the people who have the most monetary value guide and dictate our society. This reason is almost entirely for the potential of their money, not the potential of the person. The image I have created is focused on the idea that in as consumerists, we believe that the true value of our own selves is the money we have and lack value in the relationships and the true power of the people. I have made use of visual weight and a sense of imbalance created by making the left side (which resembles money) larger and closer to the viewer and on the opposite end (the people) as smaller by reducing the space occupied. The overall work is not proportionate with itself to emphasize the idea of the unproportional amount of importance placed on people who have money and those who do not.

[ccattqueen]

For this project I made a cover for the book Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender. The cover was inspired by the story "Off" where a promiscuous young woman has a goal of kissing 3 men in one night. The woman on the cover is licking a neopolitan ice cream cone to represent each man she kisses. The heirarchy of the cover starts with the title of the book, then on to a set of bright red lips representing these provacative nuances littered throughout the book. Then the flow continues onto the ice cream, and a line of a red dress leads your eyes to the author's name. I chose black for the entire dust jacket to create the greatest amount of contrast to the woman on the cover as well as hint at the darkness in each story. The display copy is set in Futura and cut in half to signify a sort of fractured realism in every story of the book. The sporadic placement of the testimonials of the back also aid in the sense of surrealism.