Audience

Sometimes I get a little scared for the future of communication design.  While it's really nice that design is getting more recognition as a necessary and valuable weapon of sorts, I worry about its misuse. Design is all about the message, anyone will agree, but what about the quality of the message? Do we, as designers have the luxury of only accepting jobs that have an important message? or, is it part of the trade now that we have to design things that don't actually mean much so we can eat?

Perhaps it is less of a problem of message and more one of how an audience is treated. I have serious qualms about designing objects that are too easy. I don't mean this in terms of functionality, I guess I am talking more about an issue of transparency. When you design something, right off the bat you assume the viewer knows certain things, ie how to read english, has his or her glasses on or can even see at all, etc. Different designs assume different things: a wheelchair assumes a person cannot walk, a toaster assumes you will only toast things of a certain thickness, a book assumes you have fingers to turn the pages. This process of assumptions is natural. 

I think it can be very dangerous to go too far in assuming what a viewer knows, but also extremely dangerous to the quality of a design to go in the opposite direction. I suppose we live in an age of convenience now, for better or worse, and things that take too long or require too much work are discarded in frustration. What effect is this having on messages, though? Is this going to destroy complex and harder to grasp concepts and ideas in favor of more bang for the buck?

The movement away from modern aesthetics is kind of a relief to me. While I think going too far into ornamentation and useless decoration may obfuscate messages to the point where it's possibly more dangerous, I think that this fear of the degradation of content is in the air. The visual trends are significantly less Swiss and clean and modern, but not quite on the doorstep of 90s grunge/postmodernism. I almost feel like we are having a safe and scientific revolt against the modern aesthetic. 

picture: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/910114

time

Something I was thinking about when doing the photo section of my site is the span of time captured in an image: the difference between an image that is meant to speak centuries and one that is over before you really know what has hit you. 

New

It's that time of year again. Rebranding time!

It always is ever much easier to brand someone else... New website with new work should be up very shortly! 

Goodbye Junior Semester One!

Hot damn. That was a really intense semester. 

Now that I'm done with my work (well...let's discount the 70+ page book I'm making for philosophy class) I'm starting that whole yearly winter break digestion process. I think I would describe this semester as:

1. most fruitful in terms of showable and interesting pieces.
2. most diverse in kinds of content tackled.
3. the one where I figured out what kinds of things I want to do in life.

It's kind of funny to think back to last year and how my ideology of design and what design should be has changed. I used to be very much a part of the school of design that believed solely in functionality and that anything superfluous must go. Who knows what happened to make me completely renege on that attitude? 

I really do respect people who make designs that save lives and help people get around. I've just found that I do not have the love and subsequently, patience for this kind of work. Is it selfish of me to say that I find it much more engaging and fruitful to say something important, something that has substance and emotion?

Content has always mattered to me. I want to take content and make it matter to people. Stupid things, like the etymology of the word "flip-flop" or even serious things, like why the American educational system is having such issues. To me, information is simply amazing. I want to think that everyone could be as intensely interested in the things in this world, it just isn't fully accessible to them yet and that is a tragedy in my eyes. 

Without getting too far into this can of worms, I will just say that so much knowledge is lost through human history. How much of it is willfully destroyed and forgotten really does terrify me. While it is impossible for one person to remember everything that has ever happened, the collective existence certainly can. 

Well. As to more mundane things... I'll be updating both this blog and my site soon with some of the work I've done this semester. And hopefully a title...