Feb 14, 2012

Designing Books

Just had a lecture by Ken Botnick, our resident book designer, for our design thinking class.

In general, I would say that my graduate school experience compared to my undergraduate has been primarily about issues of representation. I suppose, in the end, architectural ideas can only be developed refined so much, but representation much more so.

The bar is set pretty high here- there is a high level of expectation for graphic design. It is more important to know your way around Adobe Illustrator than AutoCAD. I had to learn illustrator quickly, and I've actually come to really enjoy using it for graphics and diagrams, but I'm still fond of the power and simplicity of InDesign for graphic layouts. Photoshop I use least these days, relegated to its old function of manipulating single photos or images.

Actually, our studio so far has centered around the production of books, and we're working with page spreads and books to organize our design thinking work. Hence the multiple presentations by Ken Botnick.

Got some good quotes from him today:
You can spend a lot of time...and money on fonts....and I have.
He was quite disparaging of Helvetica, but saved a lot of invective for Arial
Arial is the al-Qaida of typeface. It's an insidious force whose network is spreading.
and
The designers of Arial took Helvetica and made it bad. It's the Las Vegas of typeface.
For reference, the most popular typefaces for architects seem to be Helvetica, Swiss, and Arial. I'm not sure why. I think they all look a little too skeletal.

I don't normally link to outside content, but I'll make an exception for the typographers/designers in the audience.

I'm Comic Sans, Asshole from joehollier on Vimeo.

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Medium is the message

I moved the blog again. I deleted the Tumblr account and moved everything to Medium.com, a more writing-centric website. medium.com/@wende