A3: Self-Evaluation
February 21, 2011 § Leave a comment
As in other class critiques, I tried to offer helpful commentary. Though I was tried to share my more interesting thoughts in the crit, I think that a few of my comments may have been off topic (though they seemed relevant to me, they were not relevant to the class). I think that a challenging part of this critique was that it was so general: people’s designs tended to be similar, and commentary was more centered around the typographic variables than individuals’ approach to a design.
Though I had created designs for all the parts of the assignment that were due at the critique, I did develop those more thoroughly afterwards. On the one hand, I could have spent more time working on my designs before the critique, but on the other hand, I made much more progress on my designs after seeing how other people had approached the design challenges of the assignment.
While my post-crit blog post was a bit late, I did note down thoughts from the critique afterwards and make a plan to work on my designs: I just did not compose a blog post for it soon enough. I will try not to let that happen again in the future. Though I do not think that it was a sign of not progressing on the assignment, I should be more prompt in posting my thoughts after crits.
A3: Process
February 21, 2011 § Leave a comment
For assignment 3, which was by definition very constrained, my designs’ development was not as linear as in other assignments. Working with the typographic variables was interesting and challenging. I began the assignment by simply working with the individual variables of linespacing, typographic weights, horizontal indentation, and size.
At first, I experimented a lot. I tried design alternatives that I would not necessarily use in order to see what kind of effect they would have on the overall design. While that experimentation made me feel as though I was really exploring all the possibilities, my thinking was very limited by my conception of the limitations of the order of the information. Basically, I felt stuck: though I did not think that the date was the most important part of the information, I figured that since it was presented first and separated the chunks of information, I would have to make it most prominent.
Of the variables I was dealing with in Part 1 of this assignment, I found typographic weight and horizontal indentation to be the most challenging. One issue I had with typographic weight was my urge to bold things that I thought were keywords, rather than entire lines of text. While this makes sense on one level, the variation within lines made the overall design feel unsteady– people’s eyes had to move too much. Another issue that I encountered when working with typographic weight alone was the need to create contrast between lines of text. This meant that I had to make decisions about what text to bold. In my preferred design, I do not bold the location of the events so that there is a break between the title of the last lecture and the other information. While the location is important and leaving it in a light typeface was not ideal, it made sense to do it for the design overall, and I reasoned that most people who would view the poster and go to the event would be likely to visit the website, where they could also presumably find the location of the lectures.
The variation in the content (e.g. the length of the names of the speakers and of the titles of the lectures) made working with horizontal indentation difficult; the blocks of text had ragged right edges that made the information seem disorganized. In the end, I used horizontal indentation to create columns. Since the date was the first piece of information for each event, it was very difficult not to make it the piece of information placed in the left column. Though I tried to fight the content and put the title of the lecture or the speaker closer to the left side of the page, in the end it was too difficult to figure out which pieces of information were associated with which event when the information was broken up in the middle. Another approach that I tried and decided was ineffective was trying to create whitespace by horizontally shifting lines on the page. For instance, in some of my designs, I split the title in half and indented the second half halfway across the page. This ended up being a mistake: it broke up the information too much and made the poster difficult to read. Nonetheless, I did incorporate the same sort of idea into some of my better designs, so the experimentation, while not successful, was informative.
In this design, I tried to place the more important parts of the information (the speaker and title of the lecture) on the left side of the page and the date on the right. The result was not good: it is difficult to tell which dates go with which lectures.
In this design, I tried to organize the information for each event into columns by type: a column for the dates, a column for the speakers, a column for the lecture titles. However, the variation in the content (length of speaker names and lecture titles especially) made this design unsuccessful-- it looks messy and the columns and chunks of information are difficult to discern.
In my final preferred design for the task of manipulating typographic weights, I did not bold the location of the lectures so that I could create a distinction between the title of the last lecture (The Life of Pi) and the logistical information at the bottom of the page. I chose to bold the titles of the events for two reasons: 1) They tend to hook people's interest and attention more than any of the other information on the poster. 2) They are at the bottom of the blocks of text for each event, so bolding them (as opposed to the names of the speakers) creates a visual distinction between events and helps to chunk the information.
Though in Part 2 I struggled again with the content of the text, I did get a better feel for handling the typographic variables. My handling of typographic weight improved as I figured out how to balance my approach to boldface type. Rather than bolding only keywords or only lines of type, I tried to balance my designs by putting the entire title in boldface, but only putting key logistical information in a boldface type. I think that the result is a more steady design that still highlights key information.
In this design, I figured out a more balanced way to use typographic weight: sometimes putting an entire line in boldface (e.g. the title) and sometimes only putting key pieces of information in bold face (e.g. Carnegie Music Hall).
I continued to wrangle with the variable of horizontal shift. I tried using typographic weight to clarify the relationships between fragments of information in my earlier designs that used horizontal shift, but that approach was not successful. I still made the mistake of splitting up information too much in some of my intermediate designs, but finally accepted that it was a flawed technique. I also realized that while putting the dates on the left side of the page did mean they were more likely to be noticed than some of the other information, that could be countered by using typographic weight to emphasize the titles. At this point, I realized that I could treat the dates like rule lines or bullet points– using them to divide the information by highlighting more important parts using other variables. I then applied this thought to my preferred design that used horizontal shift and linespacing: rather than continue to try to force the information into blocks or columns, I let the dates act more as separators.
The main mistake in this intermediate design was splitting up single chunks of information by placing them on different sides of the page (e.g. the title and the logistical information in this design). While I was trying to create visual balance, it does not serve the end goal of clear communication.
For Task 8, I worked with Size and Typographic Weight. While those two alone limited the range of possible designs, Task 8 also allowed for use of horizontal shifts, linespacing, and changing the order of the information. At this point, it became difficult to juggle all of the variables. I think that the added difficulty was a good sign though: in the past, I hadn’t paid enough attention to the effect of individual variables. Now that I was very aware of each variable, I paid more attention to all of them. Though that was somewhat overwhelming, it also made my designs much more deliberate and thoughtful. I had trouble choosing a preferred design for this stage: I had trouble deciding whether adding more variables to reinforce the hierarchy was truly necessary. The ability to change the order of the information was liberating and let me impose my own idea of the relative importance of each piece of information on the design. Nonetheless, with so many variables to use to change the hierarchy of the information, I could also produce good designs without changing the order of the information. I had wanted to change the order based on the assumption that people would read the poster from top to bottom. However, with enough manipulation of typographic variables, I discovered that I could change how people would read the information, so reordering the content, while nice, was not strictly necessary.
In this design for task 8, I left some of the hierarchy of my design ambiguous. While the size of the titles gives them prominence, the bolded names of the speakers also stand out. The benefit to this is that both pieces of information that could intrigue someone are very visible. The downside is that the "viewing path" thorough the design is unclear: it is difficult to know exactly what to read first.
As with the other variables, I experimented a good deal with color. The main insight I had while working with it was the tradeoff of color: while the hue draws attention to colored text, it also reduces contrast with the page, which can make it less attention grabbing. In many of my experimental designs, color made the visual/typographic hierarchy more ambiguous. Still, I liked the subtlety it added to my designs and I felt that many of my designs that incorporated color (even if it was only grayscale) seemed more polished.
One of my designs for Task 9 incorporating color. I like it, but it was not my preferred design.
Another good design I made with color. While I liked it, the hierarchy of information between the title and the information for each lecture did not seem as clear as the hierarchy in my preferred design.
The final task, task 10, seemed to have one key pitfall. In adding rules and/or bullets to a previous design, there was the risk of introducing too many variables to a design when they would make it less clear. At this point in the task, I tried to remember Ellen Lupton’s advice to use only about three typographic variables in a design. Still, since I liked many of my later designs better, it was very tempting to just add onto them.
Adding rules to this horizontally shifted design could not save it.
I pattern of color that the bullets in this design make: it makes them seem decorative and less like bullet points in notes. Still, the design overall is not as strong as some of the others, and the size of the type would make it less legible from afar.
For my final designs, the key was doing more with less and doing less with more. Working on designs using single variables meant I had to be creative about chunking the information. It was impressive how much one variable alone (like linespacing) could do to create a visual hierarchy. Still, in one way, it was easier to do more with a single typographic variable than to harmonize multiple variables– to do less with more. In the later designs, it was tempting to use all of the variables that I had explored, but I think I was fairly successful in doing so. I think a useful approach in the future when creating designs will to be to work from the start with three typographic variables in mind: limiting the factors at play, then choosing other variables and working with those to explore alternate ways to present the information.
A3: Updated Parts 1, 2, and 3
February 21, 2011 § Leave a comment
A3: Final Draft
February 21, 2011 § Leave a comment
My final designs for the tasks of:
1. Linespacing
2. Typographic Weights
3. Horizontal Shift or Indentation
4. Size
5. Typographic Weights and Linespacing
6. Typographic Weights and Horizontal Shift
7. Horizontal Shift and Linespacing
8. Size and Typographic Weight
9. Color
10. Rules/Bullets
Julia Teitelbaum CDF 
