Notes
Slide Show
Outline
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Introduction
  • Benjamin Disraeli: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." [phrase popularized by Mark Twain]
  • How to Lie with Charts, Gerald Jones, iUniverse, 2000 [title inspired by How to Lie With Statistics
    by Darrell Huff, Irving Geis]
  • http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/
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Roadmap
  • History
  • Design today
  • Design guidelines



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What is Graphic Design?
  • “Of or pertaining to drawing or painting. graphic arts: the fine arts of drawing, painting, engraving, etching, etc.; also, the techniques of production and design involved in printing and publishing; graphic design: graphics (sense B. 2 below); so graphic designer.” OED
  • I.e., historically, chiefly 2D visual work, often involving printing. Now includes photo, digital, etc.
  • Taught chiefly in art schools or as vocational track in liberal arts schools, but boundaries shifting and blurring
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The Visual Display of Information
  • Design deals with the display of information
    • Words
    • Diagrams
    • Graphs
    • Charts
    • Etc.
  • Good visual design complements other types of content and helps deliver a message that is understood by the recipient



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First Graphics
(intertwined with history of technology and culture)
  • 35,000 – 4000BC Cave paintings
  • 2000sBC: first writing systems (“visual counterpart of speech”) p4HGD
    • Pictographs
    • Cuneiform
    • Beginnings of hieroglyphics
  • 1000sBC: Egyptians create first illustrated manuscripts—combining images and writing
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Visualizing Language
  • Chinese calligraphy (~1800BC): used today by more people than any other visual language system
  • Chinese invented printing: (3rd c BC-3rd c AD) seals and wood block prints
  • Phoenician alphabets of only 22 abstract characters in use by 1500BC. (Aramaic alphabets spread eastward)


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Writing and Printing
  • Illuminated manuscripts from early 5th c AD
    • initial caps, ornamental designs, illustrations
    • using technology of paper making
    • Codex (book) vs. scroll, from 1AD+
    • Celtic manuscripts (600s AD) spacing between words!
    • 6th-10th c: lower case letters developed
  • Printing: Moveable metal type (Gutenberg’s press, 1450)
    • vs. scriptorium


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Typography
Names and Faces
  • 1100-1300s: Gothic, heavy type based on handwriting of the times
  • Islamic manuscripts and science without peer in pre-Renaissance world
  • Aldus Manutius, humanist and scholar (1450-1515), established printing press in Venice. Invented model for Garamond, protoype for 2 centuries European typographic design [p.90].
    • Also first to bring out an italic type
    • Company “Aldus” created Freehand, bought by Macromedia in late 1990s (also Pagemaker, bought by Adobe)
  • Claude Garamond (early 1500s). High-quality Roman type faces, first typography independent of any one printer.
  • William Caslon, England, early 1700s (for 60 years nearly everything printed in England used Caslon fonts, refinement of Garamand’s)
  • John Baskerville (1700s). Early 1800s
  • Giambattista Bodoni, 1790 , press in Rome. Very thin serifs, letters from small number of shapes—interchangeable parts.
  • Modern fonts like Gil Sans are often “sans-serif” (without serifs) and feature strong verticals


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Information Graphics
  • Rene Descartes early 1600s): x- and y-axes, Cartesian coordinates, repeated axes= Cartesian grid
  • William Playfair(1759-1823): invented line chart, bar chart, and pie chart
  • Edward Muybridge—scientific photography (horse pictures 1877-78)
  • Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983 (2nd edition 2001)
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Charles Joseph Minard, 1861
  • Width of band indicates # of soldiers
  • Plots size of army (width of band), location (on 2D map), direction of travel, and temperature on selected dates
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William Playfair
  • Price of wheat, time (16th,17th, 18th centuries) and reigns of British kings and queens.
  • Line along bottom shows price of labor—and how wheat has never been so cheap compared with that price
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William Playfair
  • Line chart
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Recap
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“This will kill that…”
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Role of Design
  • Before we said:  “Any version of King Lear has the same information (vs. a copy of a Rembrandt or a small image of a Rembrandt in an art test book)”
  • Well, not completely true
  • There *is* a difference between versions of King Lear:
    • Typesetting
    • Folio size
    • Date of creation
    • Medium (quill pen, laser printer, off-set press, etc.)
  • Differences in visual aspects (vs. hearing it read, for example)


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Advertising Graphics
  • Industrial revolution: billboard, posters, advertising
    • Led to new type faces, mixing of fonts
  • High-speed printing
    • 1810 400 pages/hr vs 250 by hand
    • 1815—2,500 pages/hr
    • 1827 NYT @4000pages/hr
  • Keyboard operated typesetting (linotype) by Mergenthaler.
    [HGD p133]
    • 1886 first demonstrated in NYT office
  • Printing less expensive
  • Color
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“Swiss Grid”
  • Influence of modern art
    • Swiss and Netherlands: geometric forms, grids underlying design decisions [HGD p.225]
    • Other -isms


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Paul Rand
  • Paul Rand (1914-1996),
  • and corporate identity
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More Corporate Identity
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Photography
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Wright Brothers’ Flight 1903
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Today’s Graphics
  • Digital graphics: e.g., April Greiman
  • David Carson, b. 1956
    • broke rules: no grid,
    • no contrast
    • odd cropping
    • reverse leading (lines overlapping)
    • columns with no gutter
    • unusual widths, etc.
    • (think WIRED).
  • Ever-changing MTV logo colors
  • Explosion of typefaces, Web, interactive text, Multimedia


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To See or Not to See…
  • Some style rules perceptually based, deal with legibility
    • Tall skinny columns easier to read then very broad ones
    • Size of type etc.
    • Capitals, spacing between words
    • Modern book design (Aldus, Baskerville)
  • Some “rules” based on cultural trends, like fashion
    • WIRED, etc.
  • Type for different media
    • Micosoft researching screen-readable fonts. Use with lcd panels, PDAs, cell phones-- sub-pixel positioning. Word “reading” format
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"Style"
  • Style, look
  • Can be automatically produced …
    • Salesin auto-layout paper http://grail.cs.washington.edu/pub/abstracts.html#AdaptiveLayout
      • Algorithms
      • Heuristics

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“Joshua Tree Principle”
  • She reads about the Joshua tree and thinks they don’t exist in California.
  • Steps outside and sees them everywhere
  • “Once you can name a thing, you’re conscious of it. You have the power, you are in control.” p14
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Guidelines (Note relationships to perceptual rules!)
  • Contrast
    • Avoid the “merely similar”
  • Repetition
    • Repeat visual elements throughout yr piece
  • Alignment
    • Nothing placed arbitrarily—each elements related to others through alignment
  • Proximity
    • Related items close together

  • Type
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Creating Space
  • We saw with perception lecture and drawing exercises that 2D lines and areas of dark and light can convincingly evoke 3D space
  • Same perception rules can be applied to type design and graphic design in general
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Proximity
  • Rule 4 “Interpret elements nearby in an image as nearby in 3D.” [Hoffman, p.32]
    • If all your text is hanging in space, where in space is it?





  • Think of text blocks as objects
    • Put related ones near to each other to have each become a part of larger object.
    • If non-related text blocks are near each other, the layout is fighting the meaning… like parts of objects that don’t combine to make a meaningful whole





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Semiotics of Proximity
  • Things near each other pass signifieds back and forth more easily than things that are farther apart
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Alignment
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Alignment—
Perception
  • “If two visual structures have a non-accidental relationship, group them and assign them to a common origin.” [Hoffman 1998 p.60]


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Repetition
  • Consistency
  • Long history in design
  • Unites elements, pages, etc.
  • Can be a color palette
  • Ecological? Many environments have repeating elements, textures


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Contrast
  • Relative scale
  • Framing
  • Perception—how they created a sense of space
    • Figure-ground
    • Depth perception
  • Hierarchy of viewing/reception of info
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Things to Contrast
  • Scale
  • Value
  • Line thickness
  • Colors
  • Shapes
  • Spaces
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C.R.A.P. in Other Visual Genres
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Type
  • Styles


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Business Cards
  • We’ll be looking at business cards in more depth later—and making some.
  • Type: pay attention to different type as you read books, advertisements, and other written material


  • First, the computer science side of “graphics”…