The Design Guy Teachings In a Nut Shell
For anyone out there who wants a good solid grounding in the basics of design principles and methodologies you got to check out The Design Guy, aka Anthony Rotolo, a New Media Designer from Brooklyn New York. The Design guy is both an online BLOG and an a weekely Audio Podcast.
What follows is a summary of all the teachings from the Design Guy’s first series of 37 Audio Podcasts on the Principles of Graphic Design.
The Differenciater? – Design is at the heart of the information that drives? a business.
Design is a democracy. Tools are cheaper, information more accessible through the internet. Everyone is a designer. However if you learn only methods you are tied to methods but if you learn principles you can create your own methods. The great graphic designers of our time have created their own methods through from solid understanding of principles involved in good design.
What is Design?
Design is the act of creating order out of chaos. We all have a desire for this order.? Man is forever ordering and designing his world. As designers we are constantly emgaged in integrating elements,? bringing order to chaos, shape form and hierarchy to message, putting ‘extra’-ordinary in the ordinary. Enhancing understanding and meaning to everyday things. The process starts with unrelated elements and ends in a? cohesive unit. Graphic Design is not Art. i.e. Fine Art. Graphic Design has a distinct purpose. It’s purpose is to communicate a distinct message. The graphic designer employs principles, methods and tools such as typography and illustration to deliver this message in the most effective way. Some more famous designers have distinct styles and are sought out for their particular style. However their work is still commercial art. It has a direct purpose, whether that is to sell a? record or promote a social event.
Graphic Design in its purest form is information design.
Massimo Vignelli.
Type is our primary imagery (Typography). Letterforms (Which are negative and positive shapes) are symbols and create words that have the power to evoke imagery in our audiences minds. Type itself is powerful imagery. Typographic design is in itself a very skillful disipline of Graphic Design. A good typographer is a? master of negative and positive spaces and how shape and form interact in these spaces.
We are Typographic Man.
Marshall McCluan.
How Design Begins!
Listening. Graphic design must support an objective typographic message. If there is no message there is no graphic design. The process begins with listening. Ask the right questions in the right way and fine tune your response to that question. Listen for the requirements. Requirements define our project (size, market, dimensions, deadlines, constraints, context, etc). We got to get comfortable with listening. Clients don’t always tell the full story. Often Clinets are not really in touch with there business… We gotta fill the gaps by asking the right questions. Avoid swaying the project to suit our own comfort goals. Questions should take us to the heart of the matter… the heart of the message.? Avoid closed questions (YES NO answers). Leave expense out for now… Explore… get to heart of their message.. overt and covert… find out the Theme of the project… Organic and natural ideas will flow from theme… without a theme we get contrivance from lack of understanding… Get clear what the client wants… Remain vigilant… avoid funneling client towards what we can do instead of remaining open to all the possibilities for the client… ask ourselves questions.. don’t force a? certain direction because you are comfortable with a? certain tool… get confortable with probing your client and exploring all options.
“…get comfortable with asking questions that give birth to understanding”
Anthony Rotolo
Principles. Software comes and goes but principles remain. Timeless principles of design. listening is the key to gathering the retirements. Excavate the clients core message. Questions are to Design what picks and shovels are to archeologists. Challenge our client. Sift the junk and get to the heart of the message. Side step the confusion by laying a foundation of understanding through careful questioning and listening. Prevent ourselves from jumping to conclusions, falling into our comfort zones, pushing tools of which we are comfortable. Research. Look at competition and competitions products and marketing. Think expansively. Remain open at the start. However, do avoid ‘Paralysis of Analysis’ in your research phase. Iceberg analogy… remember the final product only reflects a? small amount of? what the client wants to say is…the key is to find the essence,? the core the message, the tip of the iceberg… for the tip is the iceberg is still the essence of the message refined.
The Designer
We are a? medium. Designers are the medium for communication. We take clients verbal language and translate this to a visual language. We bridge the gap for our clients to their market place. Clients requires someone with special attributes and special communication skills with an understanding of the? Zeitgeist of our time to channel their message to their audience. Do you have what it takes?
The Designer’s Attributes.
Every design is different from the next. 1 problem shared with 2 designers could very well produce 2 distinctly different ideas yet communicate the same essential message but there are certain traits that designers should have in common.
“Among the myriad definitions of graphic design, one of the most
illuminating is by American designer and writer Jessica Helfand.
According to Helfand, graphic design is a visual language uniting
harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and
content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a langauge of cues and
puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual
inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye.”
Adrian Shaughnessy
Take an interest in the world? around you. Read widely, expose yourself to all varieties of cultural experience.? Become a well read generalist as opposed to a specialist. Its as simple as having enough knowledge to connect to a? wide and varied audience. Graphic design either informs, persuades or sells, through effect visual communication.? The better we can verbalize our ideas and thoughts the clearer our overall communication will be. LISTENING is key to all effective communication. Learn to listen.
Graphic Design is a? hybrid of art and craft. On one hand is intuitive almost magical on the other hand its practical with guiding rules and tools. We are creative craftsmen. Design is a community of craftsmen sharing ideas and tools and thoughts. There are established communities such as the Graphic Artists Guild GAG that help cultivate the love of the craft among fellow design craftsmen.
Getting Creative.
“If you learn only methods you are tied to your methods but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first step in the creative process, after listening to the client and devising a creative? brief,? is the data gathering stage. Sometimes ideas come to us effortlessly other times we get stuck and get performance anxiety. Don’t panic. Relax. Forcing matters does not work. Step away from the problem. Loosen up. Stretch. I step into a quiet space for 5 minutes and do a sun salutation (a quick and refreshing yoga posture). Switch the mind somewhere else and return later. Creativity is a? process. Sometimes it might even feel nonlinear and frantic but it is a? process none the less. Ideas are an output of? a mental process. An idea is a new combination of old elements. (See article on A Technique for Producing Ideas). Don’t Panic. Don’t think you are a? fraud. It does happen. We are only human after all. This creative process is a? curious thing. Staring at a? blank canvas is scary but in we are fearful and stressed it only produces a strained and fearful atmosphere that is counter productive to what we are trying to achieve. So the first rule is to relax. Stop forcing.
Information feeds our creativity. Therefore information gathering is essential to the creative process. The more information we gwt from the the client the better even if they think it might be unnecessary, or someting they dont like. Knowing what they don’t like and don’t want is as importnat as knowing what they do. There is always an attempt to communicate in graphic design and the key to good design is to find the most effective way to craft this communication to an audience.
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