This Class

I like how this class was designed. Your lectures worked very well and for the most part all the information required were right in front of us. I would consider using something other than video furnace. Not everyone is going to have a fast enough internet connection. The class was very well structured. Five weeks and it's done. I learned a lot in the class and even enjoyed myself at times. Thanks for all your help.

Old with the New

This I thought was an excellent idea. I have talked about wanting a 68 Camaro with a new age interior and 4 wheel disk brakes forever. Dodge melds the old with the new. The Challenger comes in an old muscle car body style but has all of the amenities of your little Honda civic, save for the gas mileage. This car is perfect for those people who have always wanted a muscle car but would never have the time or the knowledge neccessary to take care of a 40 year old car. If I only had $40,000 to burn.

Iphone

The Iphone is absolute genius. My phone does absolutely everything that an iphone does so why is the iphone so popular. Well, they waited until the ipod was populare and they designed the Iphone for everybody. I have a windows mobile phone and I can get just about any app I want for it, and most of them are free, but I have to know how to instal them. I need to know what a .cab file is. I need to know if the program is compatible. An Iphone is designed so that it does everything for you. Want an app download it and it now works. Oh yeah and they are making money off of all the apps that are made for the Iphone. Genius.

Palm Island

Now talk about a design. Who's idea was this. This was designed just to sell to the outrageously wealthy. Where else can you have a house on an island shaped like a palm that you can see from space? Talk about limited real estate. These people were geniuses.

Min Map design

Design Culture and Language

Design is the planning for creating an object or system.
Culture is a set of shared attitudes and values.
Language is a system for encoding and decoding information.

I believe that culture and language influence design. You need to design something that the people will understand and relate to. If you don't understand the culture and how they process information, your design will fail.

I like this car. Obviously this is an attempt to create a good, rugged looking vehicle that gets good gas mileage. They appear to have taken into consider consideration aerodynamics, the power structure, and style. I just don't think it is going to sell very well in America. Don't get me wrong it looks cool but, I don't know about you, but if I'm driving around with somebody I'd rather have them sitting beside me than behind me. Now, if you used the vehicle just for transportation too and from work then it might be feasible but by the look of it, it might be out of most people's price rang for a work vehicle.

A design quote

So I was searching for a quote about design. I ran across a website http://www.bizcommunity.com/Quotes/196/13.html that list design quotes of the day. I found one that I recognized, and then I figured out why. It is from George Smith Patton, also known as General Patton. I know this quote was not originally written about design but I think it fits very well. If you tell someone exactly how to do something they will do it exactly how you requested. If you give a person a goal and just let them figure it out for themselves, they will figure out their own way to achieve the desired outcome. As far as design goes, if you give someone exact specifications you will only get what you requested, but if you give them minor guildlines, you never know what you will get.

Bruce Mau

I believe the most helpful point in Bruce Mau's incomplete Manifesto is

1. Begin anywhere.John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

I think that this is very helpful when starting a project. I find a lot of times when you have something you need to create, even a paper for a class, it is difficult to know where to start or exactly how to start. With out starting you can't get anywhere. There is no foreword motion. If you just start and deal with mess you are better off. There is bound to be some good things that come from whatever you did.

Program Design

Computer programing does have a design aspect to it. The first and most important aspect about program design is, of course, functionality. It must function properly, but after that how you put it together is entirely up to you. First you separate parts of the program. For instance I wrote a music player program with a group for a class and we separated the library stuff, ie. song information and data, the control aspects, ie playing the song, skipping to the next song etc., and finally the view, what the operator actually sees, I did this part. As you can see there is also a lot of designing that just goes into where to put buttons, pictures and read outs.

Graphics

I looked up graphic design and found a bunch of pictures. This one caught my eye. This looks like it could be used to sell a service. It looks like your on the only path in all of this darkness and it starts right in front of you.

Visual metaphors

I Just thought this was funny, but there is not enough to write
about!





I also like this visual metaphor. It's the same old business man chained to his desk bit but this time he is chained to his cell phone. At least you can leave the desk at work. The business man is giving us a look of, please help me.

SpecOps Poster

Look at this Army special forces poster. You can tell that it is a recent poster, a couple of years any way. X-games, X-treme sports, and now X-treme soldiering. This add is going for the adrenaline junky. Looking at a lot of recruitment adds you usually have a man in uniform and some tough saying, like the few the strong, etc. or, in the older posters a good looking woman telling you to be a man and join. Now, look at this poster. There is million things going on here. You have diving rigs, which by the way, Army SF really doesn't do, sky diving, they're in a hummer in Baghdad, they're on horse back in Afghanastan, they're doing cold weather ops, and jumping out of helicoptors. Who wouldn't want to sign up. Also, look at the backgrouns of the poster. It's like an explosion just went off. There's fire and billowing smoke, man my hearts pumping already.

Google typeface

I chose the every popular Google logo to analyze. This is the original logo. The first thing I noticed is the exclamation point. I don't thing the logo still has one. I think that it was put on the original logo for familiarity. YAHOO!. The next thing I noticed was primary colors, to me that says, this search engine is easy to use. Now, if you look a little closer at the colors there is almost a pattern, but the green l is thrown in there. Almost saying we don't follow the rules, we're different. The text is also cartoon like, which just says fun!

Milton Glaser's phylosophy

Milton Glaser believes that the life of a designer is somewhere between an artist a business man. Practitioners of art create commonalities. He believes that as a graphic designer you have a responsibility to the consumers because you have access to their minds. You have the ability to transfer ideas to people. You want to have some relationship to your city, your country, and to the world.