Process, Not Product

• June 29, 2008
  Nil Comments // Graphic Design

The finished product is the manifestation of all the thought, development and care you put into a project. It is not, however, what you should jump to instantly. It shouldn’t be your immediate goal. It is the process you go through—the thought, development and care—that you should concern yourself with the most.

The difference between an amateur and a professional designer is thought. An amateur is someone whom the client’s words are gospel. They will produce what a client asks for in the brief, using layout, font, colour and imagery suggestions without hesitation, giving them exactly what they were asked of. A professional will give a client what they need. They will view the brief as what a client understands their needs as being and will see the suggestions given as a starting point to get an idea of what said client is after in feeling and thought. An amateur will leave a meeting and begin to act. A professional will leave a meeting and begin to think.

Always ask questions

‘Always ask questions’ is something I found my self scrawling in my notebooks while studying. I wanted to remind my self that there are no stupid questions and that sometimes acting the fool, never taking anything for granted, can strongly work in your favor. And there are so many questions to be asked; of your client, of fellow designers, of the audience and, most importantly, of yourself. Why am I using this photo? Why these colours, these fonts, this layout, this paper, this look? Should it be simple, complex or more elegant or this or that? Should it be bigger, smaller, should I use a photo or an illustration? Or purely type? Is this the best I can possibly do? The best that can be done for this problem? Does the client even need to say this and show that? These types of questions are the crux of the design process. Through asking questions, you push your ideas through evolutionary steps—you push them to the next plateau of your creativity—helping you get a better understanding of what will work, what is obvious and most importantly, what the core goals you should be aiming for actually are.

You’ll find yourself considering outcomes you wouldn’t have
unless you sat down and let your curiosity blossom

The Beauty of Minimalism

• June 18, 2008
  2 Comments // Graphic Design

Most poorly designed pieces have something in common; they’re too complicated and too busy. Too many fonts, too many photos, too many logos, too many colours. Just too much. Have a look at the majority of the award winning work that’s floating around—there are few fonts, few photos, few logo, few colours. Even the busy looking designs can be broken down into simple elements.

Design is about being able to convey a message, which is more often than not bundled with an emotion, in an effort to evoke a reaction in an audience. One of the truest maxims I’ve ever known is; if the message is interesting, if it has power and strength, then wrap it in a simple design—let the message do the heavy lifting, not your design. Let the audience discover the emotion or thoughts or connections themselves, let them fill in the gaps, rather than forcing something onto them.

Before we get too far into this, I’ll offer you a brief explanation as to how I came to the genesis of this article. While working on a piece about realism in illustration, I found something much more interesting. Recently, the team behind Family Guy put together a 40 minute retelling of the first Star Wars epic – A New Hope. While comparing the shots of the original film with their illustrated counterparts I realised there was a different kind of article burried in the 240+ stills from the movies I had put together – Blue Harvest, the Family Guy homage, was a well designed take on the original that with or without intention, demonstrated minimalism in an awfully fun way.

Why simple is good

More often than not, the reaction we are trying to provide, be it an emotion, thought or action, is complex and powerful. To make someone laugh, you wouldn’t have a routine that rivals Who’s on First? in length in your layout, would you? Instead, you’d use a single image, with a single tag line, that when combined will generate the reaction you are after – a smirk, giggle or hopefully, a fit of hysterical laughter. The audience will see the image and the line of text and relate it to an idea or experience they hold locked away in their memory, waiting to rise to the surface when triggered. The less there is on the page, the fewer of these memories there are trying to be remembered. A simple combination can deliver powerful results. A simple combination, a simple solution, means there is less to absorb and understand, that is, the easier it is to ‘get it’ now and the easier it is to remember down the track.

Recreating a mood

Take a look at the following shots. The opening to A New Hope is something that everyone vividly remembers experiencing for the first time. An enormous, technological marvel passes over the audience, belittling a moon and surface of a planet as it menacingly chases it’s victim. This mammoth ship is light-years ahead of anything that we can fathom—it’s awe inspiring. It is this that the illustrators of Blue Harvest wanted to recapture. This feeling of awe and of shock. When it was first seen back in the day, it’s complexity was phenomenal, it was like nothing seen before. However as time has gone on, it has became less phenomenal in the world of Science Fiction. So the artists of Blue Harvest had to do what they could, to recreate that initial feeling of awe. So they added detail, more detail than the original. More lights, more compartments, more gidgets, more gadgets. Each one simple in its self, adding up to a more complicated whole.

The Bird: The Redesign of Retinart

• June 4, 2008
  Nil Comments // Retinart

Retinart has existed in one form or another for a few years now. Most of the changes made, existing solely in my own mind, didn’t actually turn into much. It is now that I feel that I have taken the right first step.

This domain has been the address for a slew of folios, a self-centered blog or two and mostly empty, in promise and content, ‘coming soon…’ place-holders. Then I designed the previous version of Retinart and started to write. While I was, and still am, comfortable with my writing looking like that of one who is new in the arena, the amateurish design I employed was sub-par. And what do we do with sub-par work? We kill it. Build it better, bigger and stronger. So welcome to version two of Retinart—I do hope that it pleases.

I mostly find my self wondering why it’s so necessary
to try and force so much content into my field of vision

Blog design is an interesting branch of the tree. Being a primarily print-based designer, web design is often a little odd to me. I mostly find my self wondering why the designers of most sites find it so necessary to try and force so much content into my field of vision. When it comes to blogs, it seems like the people behind them want to push a whole lot of content as well as their most popular articles, their latest articles, their featured articles, their Flickr steam, Twitter stream, favorite YouTube links, links to their friends blogs, feeds of their friends’ blogs, the blogs that have linked them and the blogs they hope will link to them once a referral list is looked at, and don’t forget links to add each article to Digg, Delicious and who-knows-what-other-social-network. You would be forgiven for thinking that these sites consider hits to be the main focus, with the ends justifying the means, rather than good content, that is actually worth linking too. All of this superficiality is what I want to avoid like a plague.

A page out of my notebook as well as an early Photoshop composition