5 of 365 - alignment design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
5 of 365 – alignment design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Alignment is a design method for maintaining order, readability, and sense. Horizontal and vertical alignment in design allows for easier reading, a more aesthetic layout, and more sensible use of the designed object. Unless the designer is specifically trying to create visual chaos for effect, alignment should be implemented well. By using visible or invisible grids, tables, or other visual underlying structures to guide the placement of items in a design, the designer can improve the understanding of the design, no matter the content.
“”Should I Stay or Should I Go” is a song by the English punk rock band The Clash, from their album Combat Rock. It was written in 1981 and featured Mick Jones on lead vocals. It became the band’s only number-one single on the UK Singles Chart, a decade after it was originally released. In November 2004, it was ranked at 228 on Rolling Stones “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list.[1] In 2009 it was ranked 42nd on VH1’s program 100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs.” ~ Should I Stay or Should I Go – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – http://goo.gl/iFwdF
4 of 365 - affordance - place setting by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
4 of 365 – affordance – place setting by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Affordance is the design principle in which a designer considers the ease with which the user can make use of the design, in comparison to other solutions. A design with high affordance is valued because it makes more logical sense than other solutions. It allows for more understanding, and less misunderstanding. An example is a door with a handle on one side and a push plate on the other, in which the suggestion to pull is clear from one side and the suggestion to push is clear from the other. Another example is that both a round wheel and a square wheel will roll, but one clearly makes easier work of rolling. Good design that incorporates affordance considers the clarity and ease with which a task is done.
I recently attended a lovely lunch with a friend, and it seemed as though there was no design to the layout of the table, that anything could go anywhere. In learning about affordance, I thought that designing a placemat in which places were predetermined for the various dishes, drinks, and accoutrement would have been helpful. Since there is a shared central dish in the design, all of the places would be connected by it. The design could work in a round table, a long table, or a square table. By suggesting actions, the design considers affordance. In the same way that you can push on a handled door, you could place dishes anywhere on this place setting, but the most sensible action suggested by the design brings ease and order. This placemat would be reversible, in the event that a left handed person was seated.
Advance Organizers are a design method where an audience is given new information in one of two ways to become oriented with a new concept. In cases where the audience is newly introduced to the topic, we might use an expository advance organizer. If an alien was trying to learn about the way that a human hand functions, for instance, we might use an expository advance organizer in the form of a description of the look, feel, uses, and functions of the hand. If the alien had hand like appendages, let’s say 3-pointed claws, we might use their understanding of that in the form of a comparative advance organizer that showed the similarities and differences between the alien claw and the human hand. The purpose of either would be to grant the audience a better understanding of the new concept before going into deeper detail, training, or demonstration.
Above is an illustration of the comparative visual anatomy of serif typography and sans-serif typography, in which the letter A is used in a comparative advance organizational method, since you, the audience, is likely familiar with the letter A.
Welcome, all, to the 2014 edition of 365 sketches. This is a simple offering for the first sketch, but gives some idea of what I intend to talk about. In this series, I intend to learn more about design principles, because in the past I focused mostly on method and technique. I hope that this series teaches me as much about design ideology as past series have taught me about design method. It is perhaps evidence of “a cart before the horse” which I am trying to remedy.
The 80/20 Principle is one in which a well-working system of any kind (book, technology, structure, organization) has distributed value and power, where the 20 percent represents the most important, the most valuable, and the most protected, and the rest supports it. We are experiencing political difficulty in this country at the moment, according to this theory, because the 20 percent has been reduced too far. The same is true in design, books, movies, or other organizations of content: If there is too little to gain from participation in the whole, e.g., if only a small percentage holds the entire value, then the entire structure falls apart, and holds no value at all. The best design, according to the theory, balances value and support at a ratio near to, but not necessarily equal to, 80/20.
I was diagnosed a couple of years back with Adult ADHD. This was a surprise to me, but not especially for those who knew me and the sometimes chaotic way in which I respond to visual stimuli.
I did not remember ever having been hyperactive as a child, and attention did not seem to be an issue for me, though later in life, I found myself having trouble focusing on one task at one time, which sometimes made it hard to carry out tasks. Often, ADHD is lifelong, and does not typically just show up without an external source.
When researching possible causes for a late appearance of Adult ADHD, there is some evidence to support concussions and head injuries as a culprit. This made me think of the sometimes funny, often scary stories I have told of the many times I’ve been hit in the head. I’m going to tell those stories here, finishing with the most recent head injury, which happened just the other day.
1. Little league baseball.
I was not very good at baseball, and as a result, I ended up in the outfield. During practice one year, the coach was hitting out a practice pop fly, I did not have my glove in the right place, and the next thing I remember is waking up with everyone around me in the outfield.
2. Little league baseball, year 2.
That’s right, the same thing happened two years in a row, and I’m pretty sure I dropped out of little league after that.
3. Parks and Recreation.
The first time I ever got stitches was when I worked for my township’s Parks and Recreation department. Mostly, the work was emptying 50 gallon drums of empty beer bottles and cans in parks, with grass cutting in the summer, but we also maintained the playground equipment. One day, I was replacing a chain net on a basketball hoop by myself on a saturday. In order to get the hooks open to hold the net, you sometimes have to use pliers to open them a bit. I misjudged my grip and the pliers went into my head with all my might. Blood started coming down my head, and I went to the hospital. The diagnosis was a concussion.
4. Moving day.
When I moved from Levittown, PA to Ewing, NJ, we got a moving truck from the storage place we were using to hold our house’s contents between the residences. I was standing on the ground behind the truck when a wooden Ikea shelf fell over and hit me in the back of the head. We rescheduled the move, went to the hospital, and the diagnosis was a concussion.
5. First week at Princeton.
I was excited to be working at Princeton University, and was going to lunch with a friend. It was raining, and I was suffering from cataracts (I’ll explain in another post) and I misjudged the last step of a set of steps down into Woodrow Wilson Hall. I went headfirst into the glass and metal door at the entrance, and a girl who saw it shrieked. The blood flowed. I decided to forego a visit to the nurse, but I probably should have. The hit was at least as damaging as my previous injuries, and likely a concussion.
6. The occasional chandelier.
Most recently, I stood up too quickly into a chandelier and blood started to flow. I do these kinds of injuries from time to time, but this one made me think of the others.
I guess more than anything, I just wanted to note the history of these injuries, but I do wonder if they have anything to do with my recent discovery of ADHD.
Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
This is an example of my love for double exposures. Back in 1994, I was in a photography class, and perhaps my best image was one of my friend Geoff Kremer double exposed with a scene in an abandoned warehouse that I was exploring with my friend Roch Pisarek. They were interesting images on their own, but together, there was a kind of spark. In the GIMP, I achieved this by importing both images, resizing them to be the same size, then placing the selfie layer on top of the newspaper layer, then setting the layer mode to Darken Only which gave the effect I was looking for. I also duplicated the selfie layer and lowered the opacity of the newspaper layer to enhance the effect.
