IDD 480 - Creative & Organized

Do those two things run together? Well, perhaps with a little practice they will in my world. All design jobs that start in the creative process have some sort of design brief. They can come in many different varieties. Whether it is written, verbal, just a picture, etc. It can be given to you from the client themselves or it can be written up your own. Not having a design brief makes the designer vulnerable to the client. My favorite line out of this entire reading is: "Graphic designers need briefs. In fact, although designers constantly demand freedom, the really crave constraint. It's a little recognized fact, but designers are only happy when they are battling with restraints."

Before starting a job, designers often sit down and go through a pile of books, magazines, and the internet scouring for ideas. An important aspect of being a designer is having cultural awareness. Clients also like to have designs better than their competitors and urge the designer to study their work as well.

Typography, typography, typography, infact that can't be said enough. Unfortunately, it is one of the tougher areas to master in graphic design. OurType has one of the most intersting ways of displaying different fonts to purchase on their website. The typography of it is so intersting that you get sucked into reading the different phrases that the different type layouts use. In fact, I almost forgot that I could purchase some of those fonts that they displayed.

The design process for everyone is different. Some people like to dive right into working on the computer. Often times I like to make simple sketches to give myself something to go by and then go to a computer screen. One very important thing to do in the design process is to look at the work from a distance, which is hard to do when it is on a computer screen. So if possible, print it out, put it on the refridgerator, and then look at it up there for a couple of days. Of course this assuming that designers have a lot of time...which we all know that we don't. In that case, we can just put it on the refriderator, step back, and avoid leaving it up there for days.

In the chatper in Baron's book, she discusses ways to organize your work. A lot of it is common sense that is pointed out to us and being smart about storing and backing up work. The five main disciplines to organizing files are: Group, Name, Show, Weed, Backup. The two that didn't stand out to me after first glance were Weed and Show. Show just means to use thumbnails to catalog our work, since we are primarily visual people. Custom folder icons can help with this. Weed means getting rid of things that aren't needed. Put process ideas in their own folder and throw out any error files. Make sure to dot his while the project is still fresh in your mind. The last thing I can say is.... Backup...backup....backup.... While I do have backups of my current work, I can't access them at the moment because I didn't make enough backups. Such as back up to a CD instead of just another hard drive.