Week 3 - Graphic Design 101
Overview
This week's class will primarily focus on an exercise to put into practice some of the techniques we discussed last week. We will, however, start with a short discussion about some more tools to help organize your design. The class will end with an intro to the next topic we will be covering in classAssignments Due Today
- If you haven’t used InDesign/Illustrator before: watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfhHvAscNFA
- Take the example screen you had at the end of class and translate a portion of it into InDesign or Illustrator. Get familiar with the basic tools presented in the above video as we will be using InDesign in class next week
- Read Chapter 7: Using Color of The Non-Designer's Design Book
- Read about Typography in Chapters 9-11 of The Non-Designer's Design Book
Class Activities
Designing With Grids (~10 minutes)
Grids can be a powerful tool for designing software. Knowing how to use them can greatly improve the order of designs and accelerate development timelines.Activity Results (Hide All Results)
Instructor Analysis (Hide Instructor Analysis)
This talk wasn't the best.
Redesign Search Results (~60 minutes)
In groups of 2-3, take a stab at redesigning the Amazon.com search results.Activity Results (Hide All Results)
Many of the groups came up with the vision of making the search results simpler by taking out information that is currently there. This led to an interesting discussion as to how the information got there in the first place.
Instructor Analysis (Hide Instructor Analysis)
This activity was too short and open ended to be effective. It was hard for the students to get beyond the most basic of concepts in their designs. That being said, it did seem like the students were having relevant conversations and were trying to consciously make design decisions. In future iterations, it might be nice to seed the students with an application frame, or provide some more constraints around what needed to be displayed.
The Importance of Designing With Real Data (~20 minutes)
Lorem Ipsum is a disease that plagues the design world. In this lecture, we will go through why it is critical to include real data in your designs as early as possibleAssignments Due Next Week
- Read Chapter 1: Understanding Data of Data Points: Visualization That Means Something
- Bring in a dataset that is relevant to you. Examples include your location history for a few days, e-mails you have received over a time period, or length of recent phone calls. Pull out from the dataset one particularly interesting insight. Send Ben a slide with some representation of that dataset.