September 16, 2014

Today:1)Reminders2)And now, some C.R.A.P.3)Fix this C.R.A.P.4)Next time!

Remember:

You should have a grade for your meme submission, unless, of course, you didn’t submit one. If you have questions about your grade, let me know.

Make sure your response blogs are up-to-date.

Robin Williams and C.R.A.P.

This is Robin Williams. She’s not Mork, of course.

She is responsible for a great many awesome design texts that are reader-friendly. You’ve started reading her best work, IMHO, the non-designer’s design handbook. It’s worth owning a copy, if you are a person who doesn’t like always looking at online books.

AND NOW SOME C.R.A.P.

As funny as it is…

… making CRAP jokes, it really is a foundational premise of design, and it’s deeply important (and thanks to our sense of humor usually quite memorable). The letters, of course, stand for:

Contrast Repetition Alignment Proximity

You read about it

So I’m going to give these to you in my words, along with a few quick examples, so you can get a good sense of how it works. First, though, let’s see how well YOU can define them!

CONTRAST

ContrastBasically stated, contrast means that things that are similar look similar but things that are different look

clearly different. This keeps your reader from becoming confused and creating relationships that

aren’t present.

It comes, of course, from literal contrast, the light-to-dark or black-to-white of an image. In design it often

ends up being about color values.

This image is a great example, and it is also a hyperlink to a

great blog entry on

contrast, if you want to learn

more.

REPETITION

Repetition

Maybe the easiest of these four concepts to define, repetition is, just as you’d guess, repeating something– a color, a logo, a typeface, a type style.

It unifies and organizes.

ALIGNMENT

Alignment

Alignment is about positioning on a page. Nothing should be put on haphazardly. There should be a reason and a measurement that guides where things are placed in relation to each other.

The image to the right links to a post that has some cool

reflection on alignment. And there’s all kinds of alignment going on with the new Windows 8 start page.

PROXIMITY

Proximity

Proximity is very similar in theory to alignment, but it’s more about grouping and use of white space.

Basically: similar things are grouped together, different things require space.

Annnnd now…

SOMETHING BROKENTo see how well we’re grasping our C.R.A.P., I want to look at one poorly designed flyer and talk about how we might make it better.

Prepare thyself! It’s… really bad.

Seriously. Are you sitting down?

From http://www.bignnastyprod.com/site/djdirty/djdirty.htm

Design choices

I’m not sure I precisely understand it, but there’s sort of a sub-genre of party flyers that look a bit like this one. Knowing that, I don’t want to act as if this is absolutely hideous, but I think you can safely say, based on our readings so far, that this is not a well designed flyer.

When addressing a flyer like this, we want to collect some key information. So let’s break down what we actually have here.

Elements

What is the event? What are the key brand info and what is critical to tell the audience?What is the key graphic thrust?

FIX IT!

Pair up.Using whatever software you want (other than word– no word), make a better flyer than the one we have.Email it to me when done.

For Thursday: Read: Chapters 7 and 8 of The Non-Designer’s Design Handbook