Kismet Arts Tangent

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Category: Essay

  • A Summary of WebDesign (with some tangents for your enjoyment)

    We haven’t had many lectures in the UI/UX class I’m currently taking. We’ve talked about some industry standards–rollovers are dead because mobile apps and the rise of the touchscreen– and some trends in design when skinning (designing the facade of a website). For example, say you’re Morpheus of the Web and you’re offering a user…

  • Don’t Be Intimidated by Software

    Through this graphic design program at Seattle Central, I am mostly learning (by “mostly” I mean, I value this a lot) what should and shouldn’t intimidate me as a person going into this field. The software I will have to learn and relearn is structured similarly in a sense. The tiers of styles (i.e. character…

  • What You Experience is Material

    A lady came into my dry-cleaning shop today (my part-time job currently is at a drycleaners) and she just graduated from business school with a minor in information technology. I was motivated to talk to her because I am still working on the copy for this video I’m making about IT. Is there a thing…

  • Storyboarding Hello Operator

    My New Media team of three (including me) worked on our storyboards for the video about Information Technology. (See last week’s post for details.) Today would be the second time I almost cried from a critique. The first time Jill looked at some underdeveloped thumbnails and called them useless and said that if I wanted…

  • Good Menu, OK Design

    I took the above picture last Sunday. I keep having software dreams. Last week I had a dream about text wrap. Today we learned how to make multiples in InDesign using the arrows and  polygon tool (command if you want to give them more room—yay for gutters), and it made me think I’ll have a…

  • I’m a User

    User Centered Design (UCD) is where the designer thinks of the user, the main focus being functionality. Tim (the teacher) discussed Information Architecture and research. Every great design molds the user’s experience, streamlining processes and giving order and priority to important information. The main theme of today’s class was research. What do you know about…

  • Visual Thinking

    “Purely verbal thinking is the prototype of thoughtless thinking, the automatic recourse to connections retrieved from storage. It is useful but sterile.” -Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking Visual thinking is superior because like when you draw something, you distill it to its essence, something that takes a quick analysis. Determining what’s necessary to make the object…

  • What I Think of When I Think of Sketching

    I don’t sketch a lot.  It detracts a lot from the spontaneity of the work. But, I don’t think people want spontaneous design. I think that’s an oxymoron. Design is a mindset. It’s solving a problem, shaping an experience, optimizing environment. It may look spontaneous, and a couple of my teachers would assert that if…