Watching the kickoff presentation in a packed auditorium at Parsons

(Yes that’s right. I’m taking a break to work my ass even harder, lose sleep, freak out, skip breakfast, and… as it were, make new friends while goofing off and having buckets of fun.)

Day 0

It started off promisingly enough. My team was solid, consisting of the irrepressible Gene Lu, the ultra-emphathetic Sera Koo, and my favorite badass code-slinger, Yang Yang. SVA IxDers + Yang was a good combination before, and I was confident we’d make something incredible together. We spent the evening before brainstorming at Le Pain Quotidienne, equipped with stickynotes, sharpies, chocolate mousse and tea.

Pre-game brainstorming with Gene & Sera... I'm sure the manager loved our crazy feast of sticky notes

Day 1

Alas, the morning of, Gene woke up feeling too sick to participate and Sera of course had to be by his side. So Yang and I ventured alone to Parsons, not sure of what to expect.

We arrived and were promptly shepherded into a large room, where tables were laid out with power strips. There was a short introductory presentation, then some people started to set up their laptops. We walked around looking for a group. Since this was a competitive hackathon, I was a little apprehensive. Would we end up with sufficiently able-bodied teammates? What if we were’t compatible, we didn’t work well together? What if I drive them crazy? At least my classmates were used to my numerous quirks.

I felt the first pangs of discouragement when the time was up for teammate hunting and we still had not found a group. They started to randomly assign us leftovers into teams together. I felt like the kid who was picked last in gym class. Oddly, I did not want to be with the other picked-last kids because, well, they were picked last too.

I will now admit that, at this point in time, it occurred to me that maybe I should just drop out and perhaps join the rest of my bedridden team. Maybe we’ll watch a movie or something.

But… as you can probably tell by the length of this post, I didn’t. And I am glad I didn’t. Because staying afforded me the opportunity to learn yet another good lesson about life:

The picked-last kids are great players for reasons you’d never expect.

In other words:

Don’t be a prejudgemental snob, even if attending an elite design program has subconsciously made you so.

My teammates ended up being everything a design hacker could want for a frenzied weekend of high-speed thinking and making: energetic, mutually supportive, hilarious, positive, helpful, intelligent. We bonded instantly. It was decided early on that there would be no pretensions, no apologies, no affected politeness. It would be blood, sweat, and tears (FUN tears!), and we were in it together.

Now we’re talking.

Eric and Aliona waste no time in getting down to business.

And what’s more, my teammates had something that ended up being a big advantage in hackathons: no idea whatsoever what a proper “design process” was. And this is good because really, when you have a little over a day to build something, who has the time for a discovery phase? How can you possibly fully “understand the problem space”? We had to agree on an idea as fast as we could based on pure instinct, and then roll up our sleeves to iterate on it like crazy. And that’s exactly what we did.

Voting on promising ideas: the sticky notes and graph paper takeover begins.

Of course, we did give fair consideration to a bevy of other promising ideas, including the brilliantly named SubCulture. It was going to be a site that lets you schedule and locate mini-events held in MTA subway cars. Niel DeGrasse Tyson lecturing on your morning commute, anyone? (It ended up that one of the other teams had happened on almost the same exact idea, and called it MTAcademy. Oh, shared headspace…)

The idea that we eventually ended up with was called EveryStep. It’s a random idea I had a long time ago for using run tracker data and micro-donations from friends to raise money for non-profits. Your friends would give your cause 25¢ for every mile you run, or something like that, thereby encouraging you to get active. And you’d be accountable to your cause, thus more motivated to run.

Some initial paper prototypes for key screens

We had a lot of fun with this, hashing out the details, slapping stickies everywhere, drawing delightfully slop-tastic wireframes and userflows, dissecting the finer points of human psychology, putting numbers into a spreadsheet to test feasibility of donation amounts, and even running impromptu user studies. Aliona and Emily went out to gather opinions from people on the street, Eric “A/B tested” some hand-drawn wireframes on fellow hackathoners, and I called my friends to gauge their willingness to use such an app. With actual feedback in hand, we were able to make decisions quickly, erase doubt, clarify points that needed to be clarified, and shore up the concept from all sides.

Eric does some guerilla user-testing on our fellow hackathoners

The sticky note and graph paper takeover is progressing nicely. It's accompanied by laptops now, and, briefly, small cupcakes.

Meanwhile, Yang was kind of off by himself coding a—and this absolutely fills me with the most loving kind of envy—Javascript runtracker that can count your steps via your iPhone browser.

Seriously. I didn’t know you could do that in a few hours.

By the time 8pm came around, we were being gently but firmly ushered out by janitors (so early, I know). But we were all pretty exhausted. Assignments were doled out for the evening, with promises to distribute files into Dropbox/email/Google Docs by midnight. We parted ways. Yang and I went home whereupon we continued work until 1am, and then we went to bed.

Day 3

I woke up early in the morning and saw that Aliona and Eric had kept good on their promises, but there was still more to do. At this point, I decided to take matters into my own hands and finish building the presentation myself. All those hours spent making SVA IxD pitch decks came in handy! Big pictures, compelling narrative, blah blah blah. I threw it all in a Keynote, cobbled together a last-minute concept diagram, and dragged Yang out of bed.

We arrived at Parsons at 11:10, just in time to catch the latter half of a presentation I didn’t want to miss—other friends from SVA IxD were also in the Hackathon, and they presented a beautiful pitch for an idea called “Purpose.” When they left, all bleary-eyed but happy to be done, Yang and I opened our laptops and continued to hack away quietly in the corner of the auditorium. Our other teammates soon arrived, bearing hydration—thank god for teammates. The minutes ticked down on the clock as we scambled to finish the presentation for our slot at 4pm.

Quietly working in the audience. Shhhh...

And then, at 2:30pm, I hit the export button and that was that. Whew… but we weren’t totally done.

After that, I still had to throw together the final designs for the demo. I had never designed so freakin’ fast in my life. The pixel-perfectionist in me died a little this afternoon. There was no time to nudge anything! None!

But perhaps, it’s for the better.

Perfectionism, as they say, is no way to live a life.

At some point Aliona ran out to get me a smoothie because I was running on empty. I can’t remember slurping it all down (I just remember asking her for something I could consume hands-free.)

And finally, finally, it was our turn to go up on stage.

Me probably saying something incomprehensible while my teammates lurked supportively in the shadows. How can one supportively lurk, you ask? Watch and learn!

This part was a blur. Obviously, we did not practice at all, but the show went on because it had to. All I remember was that I made the audience laugh a lot, something I seem to be good at in moments of massive internal panic. At some point I might have said this:

And then we were done. Done.

And yet we weren’t. Conversations with other teams followed. Connections were made. Emails written down. High-fives exchanged. Congratulations given.

Later: Bon-Chon consumed. Glasses clinked. Beers downed. Hugs given. Promises to keep in touch made.

Goofy pictures taken. There was some photo show going on in the Parsons lobby, with this great butt in it, and the opportunity was not to be missed. (Clockwise from center: Eric Schreiber, Emily Wagenknecht, Aliona Katz, myself, Yang Yang)

Time Passes…

Now I’m home, both exhausted and energized.

I signed up this weekend merely to free my thoughts from thesis. And to, admittedly, make a bid for the prize with an all-star team.

Instead, I ended up momentarily yet deeply involved in a scintillating community of energetic positive thinkers from schools and companies in NYC and beyond. I made friends, saw how other people think, and learned useful new attitudes towards designing in situations that weren’t grad school.

Grad school can be so small. Especially a grad school program that tops out at 15 people per class. To be sure, these people are brilliant, each and every one of them. But they are 15 nonetheless.

If nothing else, today was a reminder of the actual size of the world, and all the great things that lie beyond these dry-erase markered walls. Even in New York alone, there are so many awesome, intelligent, funny, upbeat people with interesting ideas, all striving to make a difference. And the only way for  me to make the most of this community when I graduate is to realize that SVA IxD, totally kick-ass program that it is, is not the entire world of design. It’s merely here to shape how I will approach design as I begin my career in the field.

And on that note, I’m off to kick this final semester’s butt!

Appendix

Here is the project slide deck, for your enjoyment:

My knee-jerk reaction was to simply “jump on it.” “Jumping on it” was a term used copiously at my last job. What it meant was to dispatch the task as quickly, smoothly and decisively as possible.

So, following my usual approach, I skipped Photoshop, slapped down some CSS and HTML, and showed the results to my mentor. He was not sold.

“Um, this looks unresolved to me.”

Oh.

It does?

My first job out of college, I learned a lot of things. Things like, in the Real World, you don’t have the luxury of taking 6 weeks to “refine” a design to perfection. That if clients don’t want to pay for more than 2 revisions, don’t do them. That if you can get away with just one revision, by all means go for it.

These “lessons”  made good business sense. And in truth, most of my lessons in my 2 years at my last job were to do with business: how to write diplomatic emails to clients, how to track and bill my hours, how to juggle projects, etc. But before long, business and logistics soon came to define how I worked. Which isn’t a good thing for a designer who wants to get better at, well, design.

And business and logistics were the reasoning behind this default working mode called “jumping on it.” When you are at a company that bills projects based on the amount of time a project is expected to take, it’s in your best interests to try and “beat” that estimated time span so you earn more. Spending hours perfecting and tweaking, and doing concept after concept in the name of exhaustiveness, just didn’t jibe with this modus operandi.

So over the months, I jumped on things, over and over again, until it became MY default way of doing design.

After a month of interning here, I’ve been slowly learning that “jumping on it” isn’t the only way that design gets done in the real world Real World (surprise surprise). There happen to be companies out there that care more about quality than business. I’m lucky to be at one of them this summer.

What of the drop-down that I had to design? I spent the next 8 hours designing the darn thing. Not just because I did not want to face the wrath of mentor Mike, but because I wanted to get back into being a Good Designer again. Not just an Effective Businessperson.

Life is short. People are busy. We all have grand ambitions, and there are always too many things to do. So it’s easy to forget that expertise really only comes with spending time on stuff. Not taking shortcuts, not speeding through it, not “jumping,” but walking, sometimes even slowing to a hands-and-knees investigative crawl.

This is the summer to unlearn some bad habits. From here on out, I’m making a note to myself: it’s okay to take it slow.

Actually, this is not so about me having an existential angst session about my chosen profession, as it is about some realizations that have come to pass over this recent holiday season.

The main thing is this: design is not as important as designers think it is. If you have ever tried to explain your profession or show your portfolio to relatives or non-design friends or even some potential clients, you can probably understand what I mean. (I am speaking here mostly about *graphic* design, but this could also apply to other types of design like fashion, architectural, industrial.)

I basically noticed that there is a prevailing tendency among those of an older generation to greet graphic design with a bit of generational detachment, like it is this “newfangled toy” that the youngsters like to play with. I heard a friend of my mother’s express the belief that graphic design is a trending pursuit of young folk who presumably have a greater need to preen and present themselves attractively. He used the example of presenting a well-made business card as being like styling your hair before a party. This smacks somewhat of a dismissal, similar to how one would dismiss a teenage girl’s overzealous preoccupation with eye makeup.

The fact of the matter is, most people understand graphic design as cosmetics, and though the cosmetics and beauty industry is hugely profitable and here to stay, cosmetics has its share of problems and stigmas. It is alternately viewed as frivolous, unnecessary, or just plain untruthful. Sometimes it’s used to mean “disguise.” And it’s telling that the phrase “painted lady” is occasionally used as a euphemism for prostitutes (never mind that it’s also a lovely butterfly).

Equating graphic design and all its intellectual achievements with the eye shadow of a street-side dame sounds like some sort of blasphemy, but I’m not going to spend the rest of this entry railing at the injustice of this perception. Otherwise I would have titled this entry “Design is misunderstood.” I don’t actually think this is a misunderstanding at all, because that would imply that designers are “right” and everybody else who has no idea what’s going on is “wrong.” One should always be cautious when invoking those words.

Ultimately, we may see ourselves as the elite vanguard of intelligent visual communication in the world, but the rest of the world simply does not agree… or really care. I choose not to find this devastating, but instead acknowledge it as a reality. Doing so may seem fatalist but I think it is a positive thing. It saves us from ourselves: the hour upon futile hour bemoaning the aesthetic ineptitude of the masses, the long nights spent agonizing about the way client X mistreats and devalues us. (Okay, in the latter example, sometimes client X really *is* a pompous miscreant, but it’s still not worth the brain cells.) It saves us from making enemies of everyone. The masses are not inept just because they can’t tell the difference between Bodoni and Caslon. They merely have other priorities. And certainly, it is a beautiful thing to know exactly when to use one or the other to harmonious effect, but we shouldn’t fault others outside of the profession for treating this distinction with some level of confusion or apathy.

Moreover, we’re not heroes. Our work is not going to, any any direct manner, save the rainforests or bring peace to the Middle East. Even those who claim to be socially conscious designers, filling the streets with their passionate messages in poster or leaflet form, cannot claim to be anything more than assistants in a cause. Makeup assistants, at that.

Where am I going with this? Hundreds of articles have already been written in the profession’s defense, arguing for its practical benefits (boosting sales, capturing markets, inspiring action, inciting dialogue) as well as its artistic gifts. These are necessary if the profession is to survive—it needs to make a case for itself so people will actually *want* to hire designers.

The point of my rant, on the other hand, is not to undermine the work of the AIGA. It’s merely to give myself and anyone who reads this a dollop of realism. Realism so that we do not blow the role of design in society out of proportion. Designers (I guess any profession) tend to do that, gathering in enclaves to pat each other on the back. And of course, it’s great fun… what designer doesn’t want to get nerdy with a fellow designer over a heady beer, debating the merits of Typekit vs. @font-face? We need one another. But there’s a point at which we start to insulate ourselves from the realities of the outside world to our detriment. We lose faith and trust in our clients before we even meet them. We get touchy about their opinions before we even hear them out. And we spend so much time in whine-mode with aforementioned fellow designer over aforementioned beer, when instead we could be finding better ways to reach out, listen, and understand what design really means to others, and how to make it serve the world better.

And maybe, in doing so, we actually will change the world’s perception of design. Food for thought.

Happy New Decade!

The first floor was an exhibition titled “Design USA,” which was a show consisting of the winners of the National Design Awards from the past 10 years. The winners showcased were pretty predictable—many famous names like Diller Scofido + Renfro, Stefen Sagmeister, John Maeda, Adobe, Herman Miller, IDEO… I think Pentagram was mentioned a few times. I kept getting exasperated at how insular and limited and.. like, self-congratulatory the design world feels sometimes. These are names I hear over and over until it’s drilled into your head. You’d think no one else has any good ideas or knows how to innovate.

…But then I had to keep reminding myself that the Cooper Hewitt is for the general public, not for people like me who are already interested in and engaged with the design world. So it would be good for them to know about John Maeda, because he IS awesome.

But that raises the question—if their goal truly is to eduate the public and teach them about how wonderful and important design is in our everyday lives, then why did this show feel so flightly and non-informative? Visitors were offered no more than a cursory glance at each of the wide array of works without really exploring any one of them deeply enough to fully appreciate their importance. Part of it might have been that the space was cramped because they were undergoing massive renovations. The works were also organized around themes (Craft, Experience, Tech…) but the plaques were not well-placed. I did not even notice there were themes until midway through the exhibition. And most of the visitors were just filing past the displays with slightly puzzled looks on their faces. Only a few stopped for long thoughtful looks. It was frustrating, and made me a little sad.

The film Helvetica did wonders for making people appreciate the magic of design by focusing long and hard on one aspect of it: a certain Swiss typeface. But this exhibit lumped all flavors of design together and shoved it all in the viewer’s face under the general heading: look, isn’t all of it rather cool?

Anyway, it wasn’t all bad. The upstairs exhibit, “Design for a Living World” was pretty engaging. Ten designers were each given a sustainable and/or natural material to work with and they had to come up with something to make with it that, hopefully, utilizes the strengths of the material and helps the local people, ecosphere, and economy. The exhibit was set up in such a way that each room was devoted to one or two projects. Each project was explained through video, sketches, beautiful wall panels with photography from the locale, maps, background info, and of course a display of the finished product.

My favorite of the projects was probably the cocoa grater and packaging designed by Yves Béhar. He worked with an indigenous Costa Rican women’s cooperative that made these easily transportable, easily storable patties out of cocoa powder. By observing their lives and how they used chocolate (for medicinal, ceremonial, and daily purposes), he invented a circular tube grater that basically grates and collects the powder from a cocoa patty. When you are done grating, you just stir the tube directly into a cup of hot water to make a cocoa drink. There is a little stick protruding from the wooden handle of the tool that allows you to hook it to the side of a cup. I found this little implement very ingenious and it also opened up the possibility of selling it with the patties as an export gift item, to bolster incomes. People overseas who buy it will get these awesome handmade patties, completely different from their everyday heavily processed chocolate products, and get to enjoy a product that links to a different way of life.

Another project I particularly enjoyed was the gigantic knitted wool rugs by Christien Meindertsma. She used organic wool from Lava Lake Ranch in Idaho to make huuuuge yarn (over an inch thick per strand) and knitted super chunky hexagon rug modules out of them. Each rug module was knitted from exactly one sheep’s worth of wool, and if you linked a lot of them together, you get what she called a “flock.” I thought that was an interesting way to get people to remember the source of a material, by reminding them of the behaviors of the living animal that it came from. Not the world’s most useful or even usable product (the rug was pretty lumpy), but still, very charming somehow…

My least favorite ones were the furniture design ones. I don’t know. I think I am predisposed to find furniture design a little frivolous because so much of it just feels like embroidering a theme. How many more fancy chair designs does the world need? Especially flatpack plywood interlocking chair designs? (Yeah, there was one.) I get that chairs are iconic and therefore any industrial/furniture designer is just itching to design their own signature seating, but for a show like this, it felt like a cop-out solution. The maplewood bench by Maya Lin and the bamboo “forest” concept of furniture by Ezri Tarazi were beautiful aesthetically, but didn’t contribute so much towards bridging gaps or solving problems as the simple little cocoa grater did.

It was a theme of the show to have a positive effect on the world through design, but I felt that only about a third of the projects were really there in spirit. So much of design still focuses on the aesthetics and the formal qualities of an object, not enough about solving a human problem or fulfilling a pressing need. That’s not something that will ever really change. I mean, certain aspects of design like interior, fashion, and jewelry design will pretty much always be about aesthetics. But it can be so much more, and it should have been in this show.

Maybe that is why I want to be an interaction designer after all these years of wanting to be an architect or a graphic designer. I love aesthetics and its communicative properties, and I still believe clear and effective, even inspiring, communication is a priceless and important quality to strive for. But more than anything else, interaction design seems focused on solving human problems, mostly with the help of technology (super flexible, always changing), and always with a sensitivity to effectiveness, friendliness, and usability. Everything from preventing accidents to helping people make connections to making daily life easier to handle, whether for young or old, wealthy or poor. And it’s still a budding field, which I am excited about.

Tomorrow is Open House at SVA and I have to get to bed, but all I can say after today is I hope x1000 that I get into this program. I want to be in NY. I want to spend all my time walking around and observing and learning from this richly diverse, crammed-together place of sharply contrasting parts. And I want to be an interaction designer, not just because “it’s terribly trendy to care” (David Stairs), but because I think designing ways to make people’s lives less stressful, more enjoyable, and maybe more full of delight is a wonderful thing to do for the rest of my life.

100 Design-Related Blog Posts With Lists of 100 Things

1. Top 100 Best Fonts of All Time
2. 100 Inspiring Character Designs
3. 100 Great Blog Logso
4. 100 Great Inspirational Resources for Designers
5. 100 Extraordinary Examples of Paper Art
6. 100 of the Best Creative and Grunge Designs About (Hm… about…)
7. 100 Wonderful Photo Effects Photoshop Tutorials
8. 100 of the Best Inspirational Blog Designs
9. 100 Nice and Beautiful Blog Designs
10. 100 Amazing Free WordPress Themes for 2009 (And here we begin quite a few from Smashing Magazine…)
    
11. 100 Beautiful Free Textures
12. 100 Obscure and Remarkable CD Covers
13. 100 (Really) Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers
14. 100 Free High-Quality CSS/XHTML Templates
15. 100 Remarkably Beautiful Twitter Icons and Buttons (Why would you ever need that many!)
16. 100+ Free RSS Feed Icons (Honestly now…)
17. 100 Most Popular Photoshop Tutorials 2009
18. 100 Awesome High Resolution Photoshop Brushes
19. 100+ Resources for Web Developers
20. 100 Creative Twitter Backgrounds Featuring Illustration
21. 100 Gorgeous Designer Wallpapers
22. 100+ Stunningly Beautiful and Brilliant Space Wallpapers
23. 100 Crazy Skateboard Designs
24. 100 Websites You Should Know and Use (This isn’t really design-specific, but I would actually use it.)
25. 100 Websites with Outstanding Artistic Design
26. 100 (Really) Creative Business Cards (You know… at this rate Rockport Publishing could go out of biz.)
27. 100 Great Free and Open Source Tools and Applications for Web Developers
28. Top 100 User-Centered Blogs
29. 100 Outstanding Login Forms
30. 100 Sources of Design Inspiration
31. 100 Greatest Movie Posters of All Time (Technically not a blog post, but still of a designerly ilk)
32. 100 Exceptional Free Paper Models and Toys
33. 100 Amazing Futuristic Design Concepts We Wish Were Real
34. Top 100 Web 2.0 Sites (Also not really about design, but it’s stuff that list-junkie designers care about.)
35. 100+ Massive CSS Toolbox (It’s massive!)
36. 100 Greatest Abstract and Grunge Fonts
37. Inspiration Overload: 100 CSS Galleries You Need to Check Out (Okay, does this make this entry extra-super-meta?)
38. 100 Tips About All Adobe CS4 Applications
39. 100 New and Beautiful Seamless Patterns
40. 100 Design Book Covers
41. 100 (Non-Design) Blogs That Every Web Designer Should Read
42. 100 Free, Essential Web Tools for Digital Artists
43. 100+ Artworks from the Top 20 Digital Artists in Europe
44. Over 500 Layout Design Tutorials
45. See above.
46. See above.
47. See above.
48. See above. (I’m such a cheater! Ho ho ho.)
49. 760+ Photoshop Tutorials for Web and Graphic Designers (HOLY COW.)
50. So this means
51. I can take up
52. all these
53. spaces.
54. I should have taken the opportunity to write a Haiku.
55. Oh well.
56. 100 Artworks from the Top Digital Artists in Asia
57. The 100 Most Funny and Unusual 404 Error Pages
58. 100+ High-Quality Hand-Picked Icon Sets
59. 100 + 1 FREE Photo/Image Galleries (AJAX, Flash, PHP)
60. 100 Essential Mac Applications (We like Macs. We do we do we do-oooo.)
61. 100 Killer Web Accessibility Resources: Blogs, Forums and Tutorials
62. 100+ Funny Photos Taken At Unusual Angle [Humor]
63. 100 Best Sites to Find Tutorials!
64. 100 Amazing Design Blogs To Subscribe To
65. 99 Resources for Web 2.0 Design (I think 99 is game, considering there were some 101′s up there.)
66. 100+ Free Vector Files
67. 100 Most Creative Business Cards
68. Business Card Design: 100+ Creative Examples, Useful Tutorials and Templates
69. 100 Typography Resources for Professional Designers
70. 100+ Free Seamless Vector Patterns Ideal for Web Design and Print Work
71. 100+ Best Web Galleries Around for Your Inspiration (This is actually different from the one above.)
72. 100 Free Christmas Design Resources
73. 99 Kick-Ass Websites for Your Inspiration
74. 100 Excellent iPhone Apps for Web Designers and Developers
75. 100 Must-See Art Blogs (of Every Form)
76. 100+ Elegant and Artistic Wallpapers
77. 100 Ideas to Spark You Into Creative Action
78. 100.000+ Free Fonts Mega Compilation (This alone would push me over the 100 line, but I’ll be nice and make it only count for one.)
79. 100+ Resources and Inspiration for Hand Drawn Design
80. The 100 Hottest Business Card Designs (another one!)
81. 100 Unused Logos and What They Reveal About My Design Inclinations
82. 100 Cereal Box Covers
83. 100 Examples of Japanese Municipal Flags
84. Google Maps: 100+ Best Tools and Mashups
85. 100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images
86. 100 Design Articles to Keep You Motivated
87. 100+ Incredible Twitter Backgrounds
88. 100 Extremely Creative Twitter Avatars
89. 100 of the Best Designs Around!
90. 100+ Best Available Services for PSD to HTML Conversion (I feel dirty for even including this.)
91. The Definitive Top 100 Graphic Design Companies
92. 100+ Grunge Textures Collection
93. 100+ Free HTML Email Newsletter Templates (This makes me feel dirty too…)
94. 125+ Ultimate Roundup of Illustrator Tutorials
95. 100 Web Designers to Follow on Twitter
96. The 100 Most Popular Photoshop Tutorials 2008
97. 100+ Minimal and Typographic Package Designs
98. 100 Most Popular Books About Graphic Design
99. 100+ Vectors: Mega Vector Mix Collection
100. 100 Fresh Logo Designs for Design Inspiration

I could go on, but then I’d have to stop at another nice round number like 1000. So I think I’d better not, plus I really should be going to sleep because I have work tomorrow.

Well, to end on a thoughtful note, here’s a possible reason that there are so darn many of these:

• Tackle Any Issue with a List of 100

This was a completely worthwhile read. I was able to get through it really quickly by only briefly glancing at the many graphics. This either means I somehow didn’t notice Tufte’s resounding plea to appreciate graphics, or that it is a testament to the lucidity and elegance of many of the graphics in this book. Hopefully, the latter. =)

Edward Tufte is a huge data dork and has evidently studied the topic of data graphics deeply. The book is chock full of visual examples from diverse sources—news publications, historical treatises, scientific journals, etc. Not all are excellent; many are superlatively bad, such as the full-page chart that only manages to convey four data points. However, all charts used are well-chosen to illustrate each of his points.

He is also very opinionated and doesn’t hesitate to adopt an authoritative tone in sharing his Commandments of Good Data Graphics. Like a wise teacher however, he gives license on the last page to intelligently disobey (keyword “intelligently”) any of them. He also sounds like a 19th-century scholar—there is something irrepressibly didactic in the prose—but a fabulously dorky sense of humor makes occasional cameos, which keeps this work from being dry.

As a designer, the most striking aspect of this book was the extreme utilitarianism of Tufte’s attitude towards graphics. Tufte’s principle of maximizing data-ink and minimizing non-data-ink, for example, essentially states that ink should not be used at all if it is not conveying data in some meaningful way. He hates, above all else, “chartjunk,” a phrase he uses to refer to superficial decorative elements that do nothing to express the data. To some extent, chartjunk also includes “helper marks” like grid lines, rule lines, tick marks, etc.He also detests graphics that lie by exaggerating or framing data subjectively. He has even come up with a few empirical measures for the truthfulness and meaningfulness of info graphics, such as the Lie Factor and the Data Density of a graphic.

His super-utilitarian attitude is reminiscent somewhat of classic Swiss design, which seeks to distill things down to their minimal essentials in the name of clarity and directness (how well this actually works is up for the revisionists to debate). It also evokes that cliché of mid-century Modernism—”form follows function.” In these latter 2 cases, interestingly, the focus on function eventually gave rise to “styles.” In contrast, Tufte’s many examples of effective information graphics range across many different styles and seem, if this is possible, style agnostic. In this way, Tufte’s charts can be seen as going much closer to the ideal of pure function that the Modernists tried to achieve.

As a graphic designer, there is a lot to be learned from Tufte’s almost obsessive focus on maximizing data-ink. Even if you don’t find yourself making charts and diagrams all that often, it serves as a reminder that marks made on a surface should serve foremost to convey information: the more layers of information, the better. Whether they be data numbers or lines used to formally divide up a page layout, they must all serve a meaningful purpose. It’s easy in the age of vast Internet stock art sites to get carried away with putting tons of stuff onto a page and not really thinking about what it is doing there. But Tufte’s insistence on the abolishment of chartjunk reminds us that, instead of just serving decorative or vaguely evocative purposes, graphical elements used in all types of design can and should be given a solidity of purpose and richness of meaning, such as that of a well-placed single dot that expresses several numbers all at once.

The book is clearly a tour-de-force of uncompromising ideals and high standards of excellence. By the end of Chapter 1, “Graphical Excellence,” I felt like I’d just read a rousing call to arms. However, in light of reality, I can’t help but think that you have to take Tufte’s idealism with a grain of salt. In a perfect world, everybody would recognize their capacity for understanding efficient, elegant graphics and naturally gravitate towards work of Tufte’s ilk, but no—we in fact love ourselves some colorful displays that dress up our data like a duck-shaped building.

Although he argues all of his points with verve and I’m sure he has the magnificent data sets to prove all of them, he just makes it sound way too easy, even trivial, to defeat old-fashioned art director thinking with pure reason. In my limited experience, this is very, very hard. I wonder what Tufte’s early experiences convincing higher-up doubters were. Now that he is wildly famous, the former doubters actually come to him for advice, but for the rest of us, it’s much tougher to enact your ideals when you’re just wee younglings in the big design industry.

But don’t get me wrong, I think he is right on many counts. So I can only hope for the courage to stick to my ideals as well as he’s sticking to his.

Anyway, it was a very informative resource, and even a bit of an inspiring read. Tufte can make data displays inspiring; that’s how good he is. I’d gladly continue onwards to read the other 3 books of his that we have at the office. =)

View all my reviews.

Another great graphic designer talk from TED (they have oh so many). I like this one because Milton Glaser talks more about his process than about his higher overarching ideals. Also I enjoy his irreverant attitude.

Many times I’ve felt that same urge to humorously pontificate the “meaning” of this or that design, mostly to poke fun at designers’ tendency to take themselves too seriously. I would have if I thought I could get away with it. It must help to be an esteemed, established designer, which I am anything but. =)

Reading these books was spurred, in large part, by a growing unease that I never learned design the “real” way. The merits of feeling this are up for debate (yes I am aware there are plenty of untrained, successful designers out there) but I still can’t help but feel that way.

What makes a great designer? How does she get there? What is her education like? These are things I’ve pondered a lot, ever since I’ve begun to have ample time for such ponderings (i.e. when I am at work, being an HTML and CSS monkey).

I think I’m fairly lucky to have what many people might call an unorthodox design education (but it’s actually a fairly orthodox liberal arts education in disguise). I barreled through Tufts and the Museum School in the most haphazard way possible, on the way engaging in copious amounts of theory and experimentation, and sticking my toe in everything from anthropology to metalworking to architectural drafting to programming. This has given me access to and an elementary understanding of a fairly large number of viewpoints and interpretations, and it has always taught me to question, to never take popular assumptions or trends without a grain of salt. Furthermore, it has made me insatiably crave knowledge and alternative perspectives.

So far so good. There is a downside, though (there always is). Because of this, I’m not really ever sure of how to judge my own design work, whether it is acceptable/effective/beautiful or not. The mainstream design world has some very basic rubrics against which to evaluate design. The problem is, I was never exposed to those rubrics in any definite sort of way. I’ve never had a typography teacher yell at me for kerning a word wrong or creating a horrific color combination. For people who’ve gone to the Museum School, it can even seem downright unbelievable that anyone actually teaches any creative field like that anymore. The SMFA mindset believes in the potentiality of rule-breaking, not the sanctity of rules. And because they’ve had a long long time to indoctrinate me, I have come to hold this to be true.

But sometimes you just plain need a few guidelines. As I said, I have no idea how to judge my own work. And not knowing how to judge, I can only guess how far I’ve improved by sort of comparing my work to my peers’ work, or by staring at the work for a long time until my eyes melt. Learning through guessing is friggin’ hard, and sometimes it feels downright impossible.

I have good intuition, and I am good at interpreting what people mean when they talk about design, which is how I manage to somehow remain effective at work and in personal projects. I’m also slowly becoming fantastically great at copying or expanding upon a “style” or “look” that someone else has invented. But is that all there is? Am I to spend the rest of my life being great at cosmetic pastiche? It’s true that there’s no such thing as originality because culture builds on culture. But there are varying levels of that, with cosmetic pastiche at what must be close to the very bottom. I dearly hope that I don’t spend my whole life there, on that bottom rung of the profession. I wouldn’t want to stay there, even if it makes all the clients in the world happy.

Not to be impatient, but the awareness that there are tons of designers out there like me, young and idealistic and ambitious, who nevertheless end up doing solid but unremarkable work for the rest of their lives… that gives me the chills, and fuels my anxiousness to learn faster and more effectively. I guess my goal then would be to put the best of what I got out of college to good use: I have to figure out how to learn design myself. I can perhaps begin by ending this blog entry right now and training my SMFA-wrought freewheelingness to have a little RISD-esque discipline.

With a grain of salt, of course.

Before, I would spend hours and hours trying to figure out how to shade correctly, how to create a certain effect in Photoshop, how to draw the human body, etc. Now I spend the majority of my deciding between serif vs. sans-serif, humanist vs. grotesque, red vs. slightly orange, big vs. small, photo A or photo B, javascript or actionscript, etc. etc. The question is no longer “how,” but “why” this one element or style or whatever is better than the alternative.

I think a lot of things came together to abet this transition, among them primarily the huge assortment of free Photoshop tutorials on the fabulous, crazy Internets. Now I don’t have to really learn how to do anything anymore – if I desire a certain effect, I just look up the appropriate page from my vast Delicious bookmarks collection and get the info I need right away to recreate the target look. Likewise, even though I know fairly well how to render a human figure by hand, I never really will need to, because iStockphoto.com has a ridiculously large collection of human vector figures in any imaginable pose, to be had for just a few dollars and a click. The amount of readymade resources in the design world are bafflingly huge. No wonder nowadays I find myself pondering “why” rather than “how.”

Perhaps this is just another difference between how an art-oriented mind vs. a design-oriented mind operates. Art more is about the visual expression of the unfamiliar or original. Design is about the arrangment of elements (implied: preexisting) to make something pleasing. A long time ago, I thought art and design were quite similar in process because they require many of the same visual skills, but now more and more, I’m reevaluating this belief.

However this doesn’t mean the two can’t mesh, as I would always aim for – it merely means that each discipline has a lot to learn from the process of the other. For instance, I wonder if the design process is not limiting itself by focusing too much on picking and choosing between preexisting elements. I know that there are designers out there who go all out and make/experiment with everything from scratch, but that’s not the way it is taught or practiced at a lot of firms, including the one I work at. That is something I would like to take away from the art mindset more.

Sometimes its good to be aware of what you are doing, how you are operating on a day-to-day level, what conventions you’ve fallen into and others that you’ve abandoned. Which is why I write these rambly entries, I guess. =)