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| Filip Dujardin, courtesy DGV |
We talked about lots of things: the digital magazine paradigm, paper vs. virtual. Designing entertainment & new cultural niches. What drives the selection of style, that is to say: typeface, grid, image and text placement, what's the demographics? Re-designing design. The new stars. A new world out there: rich, complex, difficult.
What's on your mind?
21 comments:
Today's world is becoming increasingly saturated with technology and cyber activities. Where once people met face-to-face, social networking and other internet interactions are becoming the new social scene. People are constantly plugged in to the internet. I find it nauseating when people meet face-to-face and cannot put their phone down. Why meet with someone if you are constantly on your phone, texting other people, and ignoring the person right in front of you? What use to be rude, is becoming increasingly normal behavior. Today people's tangible lives are intertwined with their cyber lives. Internet "mecca" company, Google,is proposing and testing a new product to try to achieve more unity in these two worlds. "A team within our Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment." Project Glass has a prototype that sits just above your eyes and displays a heads-up display in the tangible world. Essentially you can use internet and technological applications in the real world. Is this going too far? Without a doubt, the technology is amazing, but is potentially manifesting the inner self by combining tangible life with cyber life worth the risk of expelling genuine human interaction? Have we come to a point that an individual is so caught up in themselves and technology, that we're willing to dismiss the art of communication and the value of differing perspectives? Are we blindly becoming cyber slaves and losing our humanity?
Project Glass
When it comes to the selection of new style, I have been noticing a particular trend. Strict grid systems are being used as a type of rigid page architecture in posters with heavy copy. For works with less copy, the images tend to stand alone, with lots of white space, and minimal copy out to the right or left, balanced with the main image. Type faces used now are typically san-serif, and are very simple. Thin is juxtaposed with thick lines of text, and simple color also helps images to pop. I believe what drives these modern choices is the move towards permeability, and simplicity. Ads and posters of the early 1900s were often cluttered. We are going in the opposite direction now with super simple choice of colors, text, and images.
While Lauren has noticed a move towards simplicity in poster design, I am sure everyone has noticed the opposite in most blogs. I am all for clutter as a stylistic choice in the physical world, but on the internet, clutter should only be used sparingly. To make matters worse, the kind of clutter blogs usually provide is a sort of hyper-clutter that results in a fleeting impact. Imagine hundreds of images and stories packed into a grid format on a bright screen, you can scroll through them, glancing for a split second, sorting out the interesting ones, how many of them would you remember? Even on your favorite blog, you probably would not remember that many. It seems blogs are designed for a quick fix of entertainment, a rapid fire of information, that will leave your mind in seconds, at most, hours. So, what is the lasting value of “rapid fire” entertainment? Well, it reflects a current state of impatience in modern consumers, and in the future, these blogs may be used to look back on a chronicle of trends.
So, is there a solution to clutter? Need there be? I know I am not alone in feeling overwhelmed by blogs on the internet. Entertainment blogs are a common culprit. I generally do not visit them because I do not care for celebrities, but if I did, I know I would stay away because of the clutter. So what solutions are available? Blogs could decrease the amount of information they provide on each page, but this would result in more pages, that is, if they were still to provide the same amount of content. Whatever the case, there does not seem to be an easy fix.
In today’s world everything is fueled by instant gratification. Our social and cultural interactions are most influenced by this trend. Any type of physical work has become history or obsolete. We no longer need physical books, magazines, art, music, etc. to be able to appreciate any of these types of work that would be deemed culturally educational previously. Today all of these things are available digitally. Does the fact that these things are in digital format only diminish their value? Some would argue yes and no. I feel to some degree it does. Being in digital format does not diminish the immediate gratification, however I believe it does diminish the value. How do you assess the value of digital art? How does it measure up to historical masterpieces? I don’t believe that it can. Sure technology has allowed us to improve and make great strides when it comes to being creative, but there is much to be said for past artists who took the time to mix the right colors, get the right shades and shadows with much trial and error. There is much value to be found in those efforts.
Suelyn Chong
Last class we looked at a variety of entertainment blogs and virtual magazines. I found these entertainment blogs to be interesting because of the design layout and range of topics discussed. However, I do not visit these blogs on a regular/habitual basis. The time I mainly look at these blogs are when I am bored at work. It appears to be a trend moving toward digital instead of physical paper. Newspaper and magazines sales have gone down tremendously and continue to decline. I do not think that it is possible for newspapers and magazines to make a comeback with an increase in digital and social mediums. Each day more and more blogs are created and now with newspaper/magazine articles that are made available online there are discussion boards for viewers/subscribers to comment. The internet has made everyone more opinionated and willing to voice their opinion for other viewers. Personally, I do not spend much time looking at blogs because there are so many and I feel that not everybody has a valid opinion to share that is worth taking the time to read.
Ashley Bahamon
I think that the most notable transformation that happened and is still in the process of happening with graphic design is the significance of the role that the design element plays. The field of graphic design began as a form of visual communication - a way of displaying and sharing a certain message whether through advertisements, books, etc. While the design was an important factor, it was merely a means of sharing the most important thing, which was the message. More recently, however, the design seems to have become more important than the message that it is relaying. The designers themselves and their styles have become more important and sought after than whoever said the words they may be relaying. This especially stands out in the post-typography movement and the rise of entertainment blogs.
Selection of style is interesting because I don't really think there is much selection involved. When it comes down to it, I think style can almost always fit into one of two different categories: vintage and modern. Things are commonly styled in a way that is replicating the past, yes it is still new, as it is a new take on something old, but the style itself is derived from the oldness of it. Then there is modern, no matter what decade we are speaking of, people are always attracted to what is considered "modern." Now, modern is usually associated with being sleeker, smaller, and more technologically advanced, but it always wasn't this way. I think that every style, whether we're talking about art, clothes, architecture, or any other design, follows one of these two paths. I think this is because our society is sort of obsessed with progress, which explains why modern style is appealing. And yet there is something classical about vintage, it is everlasting and universally accepted.
The work of Chaz Maviyane-Davies reminds us that design is also social. Above the clutter and the digitalization there is design that is politically or socially active. Just think of what the hood has come to symbolize, especially in South Florida. Or how an Obama poster became the face of his campaign.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/55/Barack_Obama_Hope_poster.jpg/220px-Barack_Obama_Hope_poster.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5L213Ip_Dg4/SH5hFlIk8tI/AAAAAAAAAtI/obAF7lHxapk/s400/Obama_Poster_Clinton_Grope.gif
It's comforting to know that design isn't static but tends to continuously grow. Good design activism becomes contagious, take Kony for an example. It was designed to be diffused through Facebook. Social design is an example of what Chaz calls "Creative Defiance."
I never really browse these virtual magazines, but after seeing some of the variety, I will start to. I was obviously not surprised by the amount of unique content- I am entirely aware of how much room for creativity is available on the Internet and how amazing some of the work produced by amateurs is, I have just had never explored the world of online magazines because I am not a huge magazine reader in general. It is tough to distinguish between an interactive website with articles and an online magazine- both possess an infinitely wide range of topics and activities, such as polls, contests, and opportunities for people to submit their own work. Even in writing this, I am not sure what the difference is, besides the way that the brand decides to position itself. At least in the case of magazines that started online… Either way, newspapers and now magazines continue to be on their way out. I believe that they will remain for awhile for old times sake and for the people who prefer something tangible with pages to feel and turn, as they say, but those generations will not be around forever and these mediums will disappear.
In this brave new world, professors will walk into classes with not students bumbling in conversation, but rather on their laptops and electronics surfing the web or engulfing themselves in social media. Our generation is hard to describe. I recently finally had taken the time to watch KONY 2012. This is an exemplary example of our time. This kind of propaganda is young, clever, and freaking dangerous, just the way we like it. We take what we know of media, art, communications, and just being social bugs, and we create a whole new battlefield. This goal to make our enemy a celebrity has been played for years, but not in this sense by the public. I mean one of our most infamous celebrities is “Terrorism” and this “War on Terrorism.” He’s pretty famous. But here’s a new one, and this one is Kony and we’d like to make him famous, not the government. So our audience is those in that white house. Kony is the new trend, and that is our design. We make trends, fads, and make it famous even if it is an age-old problem. Child soldiers are nothing new, but now it is, and it’s fresh because we make it that way. Adults must think we’re nuts.
I agree with the discussion above about how digitized forms of communication seem to be dominating conversation in some situations today. Especially forms like online social networks, blogs, texting and chat. However, I feel that they are completely necessary to the transition that our world has been going through. Everything is fast paced. Information can and will be shared extremely quickly over space and time. Even people can travel to any continent in a day or less. So our forms of communicating with each other must reflect this. It is sad that people don’t always know when to unglue their eyes from their smart phones, but the technology itself isn’t the culprit, that blame is deserved for our lack of self-control. I think that the availability of information and opinions like those shown in the blogs that we viewed last class are invaluable. For example, if I’m looking into buying something or visiting somewhere, but I don’t know anyone who has an opinion on it, I can type it into Google and find multiple blog posts dedicated to reviewing it. Very convenient. But just like everything, there are advantages and disadvantages; everything is fine in moderation not excess.
Alexandra Roe
The increasing popularity of digitalization is changing the way we experience things such as books, magazines, photos, and art. Less and less paper copies are being made and sold, and more are being stored and viewed on digital devices such as the internet, iPods, kindles, etc. While there are many benefits of digitalization such as easy access and preservation, I think that most people would agree that digitalization is not a replacement for the physical item itself, but another way to interact with it. Digitalization is a homogenization of sorts, making things that, in their physicality, are so different and unique the same thing- images and text on a screen. I think that in the future the digital medium may dominate, but there will always be those who value the physical object itself.
kaitlin
Now a days I feel that everything is being redesigned and in some way making everything simpler for the human kind. We can even see redesigning in humans, when it is talked about cloning , or modifying genes before birth etc. I feel if you look back at design it used to be more complex than today’s design. Everything is simpler and cleaner and minimalist. However there are still different styles that are still complex. With this in mind , I remember in my typography class how the professor told us how paper is being replaced by technology. I feel that in the future there will be no paper magazines, newspapers or books. Everything will be handled with technology. Which is kind of scary because it is already happening, we have e-books, e-magazines and newspapers, little by little we are getting to the point where there will be no more paper. I would not like that because we will lose the interaction with the object .
There are both pros and cons to the digital magazine forms. In an increasingly digital culture they are more economical, accessible and portable. Digitized are an asset to people whom lifestyle revolve around the digital world. Yet, one who is not versed with the digital world there is far less value in a digital version verses a hard copy.
If you think about it is an economic issue. People who see the value in digital publications will consume it, and those who don not, will not. In economics there is the idea of willingness to pay or WTP. WTP is the maximum amount a person would be willing to pay, sacrifice or exchange in order to receive a good or to avoid something undesired. People that see the value a highly portable medium have a far greater WPT index for digital publications than those who value the physical presence of property.
At the end of the day the deciding factor is the ration of those who prefer holding magazines in their hand and those who can love is just as much on a screen.
One of the biggest discussions in fields such as journalism and design is that of paper vs. digital. As designers we are trained to use programs like indesing and photoshop, but at least from my personal experience I still feel the need to sketch on paper before I transfer my ideas to a computer screen. This helps me vizualize things better.
It's a little sad to see that the digital age is taking over when a
244 years old Encyclopaedia Britannica is going to out of print to be replaced by a $70 annual-subscription online service.
However digital has its benefits like more timely information, but they fail to give the reading experience readers look forward to when they pick up a new book. At least those who grew up reading physical books will not make the permanent switch to digital.
Liudamy Sedeno
Last week we talked about lots’ of digital graphic works, whether on blogs or magazines or somewhere else. I feel like the tendency of graphic design today is getting more and more complicated and abstract as possible. To be honest, sometimes when I staring at the work of new age graphic designers even for 10 minutes, I still cannot get what the designer want to say. I think it’s something to do with the viewers. The develop of mass communication allow more and more people enjoy the fun of graphic design, in order to catch everyone’s eyes, the designs must contain a lot of things inside. Sometimes they just try to cover too much, it makes the work way to complicated and pointless. The real master of piece to me is rather straight forward in many different points of views. I always wondering when people spending time analyze one piece of work and get a hundred different ideas just based on one picture, is the designer really considered all of them when creating the piece, or because it is a “master work” so we have to carefully analyze it into so many different ideas. Can design just be simple as one meaning?
Qiansongzi Chen
Last class we spoke about the changes in technology and how it has affected our society. We looked into virtual magazines and different blogs. The world today has grown to be technology and internet based society. People are looking for that immediate gratification and pleasure. The first day of class we spoke a little about this and we brought up the discussion of the kindle versus a real book. There is something about a real book that gives it value. However, the kindle and the ipad, for example, give us that instant pleasure of reading the book without having to go to the store and purchasing it. Technology and the internet play a huge role in graphic design today. Some examples of graphic design that are internet based include blogs, social networking, virtual magazines, and ads. The world has grown to be technology dependent. Communication and social interactions are now all via computers; whether its through social networking, video chat, or email. Phone calls rarely even happen anymore, everything is through text messages. This has cause people to lose the true sense and intimacy of any kind of relationship.
Erika Gonzalez- Rebull
I decided to also talk about technology and instant gratification as mentioned above. Two weeks ago, I learned that my high school completely went digital -- as in, students are no longer to buy textbooks. Instead, each student receives an ipad. I was so taken aback by this and a part of me thought it was a little sad. This is just one example of how technology continuously makes changes in every day life. Within years, books will most likely be non-existent. On the other hand, the advances technology has made are great, but somehow I think efforts to maintain certain traditions should be made of more importance. For example, another way technology has altered our lives is through how we communicate with others. Yes, I think social media and the 24/7 access to the Internet certainly has its advantages, but I can’t help but think of my parents when they were my age, when phones weren’t around. Today, people can’t hold an in-person conversation without somehow being distracted by technology like their phones. While of course the benefits of today’s technology is great, often times, technology takes the place of physical human interaction and I think that’s unfortunate.
-Kristen Vargas Vila
Last class we spoke about the changes in technology and how it has affected our society. We looked into virtual magazines and different blogs. The world today has grown to be a technology and internet based society. People are looking for that immediate gratification and pleasure. The first day of class we spoke a little about this and we brought up the discussion of the kindle versus a real book. There is something about a real book that gives it value. However, the kindle and the ipad, for example, give us that instant pleasure of reading the book without having to go to the store and purchasing it. Technology and the internet play a huge role in graphic design today. Some examples of graphic design that are internet based include blogs, social networking, virtual magazines, and ads. We are a very technology dependent generation. Communication and social interactions are now all via computers; whether its through social networking, video chat, or email. Phone calls are even rare, everything now is through text messages. This has caused people to lose the true sense and intimacy of any kind of relationship.
Erika Gonzalez- Rebull
The first thought that came to my mind when I saw the image was “CUBISM”. Pablo Picasso was the pioneered of cubism in painting and sculpture. In cubist art the objects are broken apart, analyzed and re-organized in an abstract form. Le Corbusier was the master in the field of architecture. During the 20th century architects were searching for a style which will resemble the past. Cubism became the way to express dissolution and reconstitution of three dimensional form. The use of simple geometric figures is essential to the composition of cubism projects. Cubism allowed for buildings to differ from the classical interpretation. In this image one can assume that the original form was a perfect cube, which was broken up by the artist in order to create a more abstract composition.
Luzyanis Fraga
Graphic designing is the ability to create images and designs through combining colors and other images with creativity. It can be done using soft wares.
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