Category: professional activities

This is a listing of my profession-related activities and actions. It should let you know why I think of myself as a professional.

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6 of 365: Anthropomorphic #design #principle

6 of 365 - anthropomorphic design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
6 of 365 - anthropomorphic design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
6 of 365 - anthropomorphic design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
6 of 365 – anthropomorphic design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Anthropomorphic design is a method by which a designer makes use of angles and curves that are inspired by the human form to evoke certain emotional responses from the user of the design. For example, the classic Coca Cola bottle makes use of anthropomorphic design and reminds the user of the curves of the female body. One might also play with the proportions and silhouette of a form to remind the user of babies or men to evoke reasonable emotional responses to those ends. Designs that have content that is aggressive, safe, loving, stable, or kind might make use of anthropomorphic forms to evoke those responses in a subconscious way.

In this illustration, I decided to start with 4 female silhouettes, using half of each to create a form that repeats and reverses the half. Then, I created a container inspired by the result of the silhouette experiment. There is no clear connection between the end results and their inspirations, but each of them has a character to them that speaks to the original forms.

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5 of 365: Alignment #design #principle

5 of 365 - alignment design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
5 of 365 - alignment design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
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

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2 of 365: Expository and Comparative Advance Organizers

2 of 365 - advance organizer on serif vs sans serif by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
2 of 365 - advance organizer on serif vs sans serif by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
2 of 365 - advance organizer on serif vs sans serif by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
2 of 365 – advance organizer on serif vs sans serif by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

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.

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1 of 365 (2014): The 80/20 Principle

1 of 365 - the 80 - 20 Principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
1 of 365 - the 80 - 20 Principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

1 of 365 - the 80 - 20 Principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
1 of 365 – the 80 – 20 Principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

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.

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Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

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.

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Advanced rotation in Inkscape.

Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Let’s say you want to create a visual effect in which you have objects floating with regularity around another object, such as creating tick marks around the center of a clock. In this post, I’ll explain how you can do this easily in Inkscape. The key is in moving your center-point for the outer objects.

See the video below for a clearer explanation of these instructions. Open Inkscape. Using the text tool, create an ‘o’. Create a line with the bezier tool as your first tick mark. Put it in the perfect topmost position, aligned with the ‘o’ vertically. Click the tick mark with the selector tool until it is in rotation mode. Take the plus mark for the selected tick mark, and move it to the center of the o. This centers rotation at the center of the o. then, select the tick mark in rotation mode, and while dragging the rotation handle, hit your space bar at each place you want a tick mark. In 12 clicks of the space bar, you will be done.

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