ICA Boston Names Its Next Director
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Nora Burnett Abrams, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver,
will take over from Jill Medvedow in the spring.
6 hours ago
Creating the world around us: products, packaging, retail design, land use, marketing, the web, writing, presentations...
Step One: Learn to See
1. Learn to draw.
Get the book You Can Draw in 30 Days and practice for half an hour every day for a month.
2. Graphic design theory.
Picture This taught the foundations of graphic design (color, typography, and designing with a grid).
3. Basics in user experience.
The Design of Everyday Things
Don’t Make Me Think!
4. Learn to write.
Your job as a designer is not just to make pretty pictures -- you must be a good communicator. Made to Stick will teach you how to suck in your readers.
Voice and Tone is a website full of great examples of how to talk to users.
5. Learn to kill your work.
This is the hardest step.
Be prepared to kill everything you make.
Listen. Really listen. Don’t argue. If you ask someone for feedback, they’re doing you a favor by giving you their time and attention. Don’t repay the favor by arguing with them. Instead of arguing, thank them and ask questions. Decide later whether you want to incorporate their feedback.
Step Two: Tools.
1. Illustrator.
Adobe Illustrator Classroom in a Book--
Vector Basic Training
logo
scenic landscape.
2. Photoshop.
PSDTuts
Photoshop tutorial to make an iPhone app.
Photoshop tutorial to create a website mockup.
Step Three: specialties.
1. Logo Design.
Logo Design Love.
Designing Brand Identity
2. Mobile app design tutorial
Tapworthy.
3. Web design.
Don’t Make Me Think
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
SiteInspire.
Step Four: portfolio
- Find poorly designed websites and redesign them.
- Join a team at Startup Weekend and be a designer on a weekend project.
- Enter a 99 designs contest to practice designing to a brief.
- Do the graphic design exercises in the Creative Workshop book.
- Find a local nonprofit and offer to design for free.
Step Five: Get a job as a designer.
Each of these changes was meant to remind the people that they were indeed individuals despite their place in the Crowd, and as individuals they still had social roles and responsibilities to fulfill. Moreover, these changes synchronized the Crowd by putting people through the same paces at the same points. But perhaps the most significant change would come from the architectural firm Warren and Wetmore. A deadly collision in 1902 preceded public demand for an even safer, more accessible terminal. Warren and Wetmore won the bid for reconstruction, and the plan they produced included galleries, which added yet another transition area but, more importantly, rendered the Crowd into a spectacle.
1. Proximity
"Internal proximity can make a community feel sheltered..."
2. Enclosure
"...courtyards are more enclosed than fenceless yards, creating interior space without ceilings..."
3. Scale
"Smaller buildings tend to be associated with comfort..."
4. Accessibility
"Amenities include public transportation, shopping areas, kindergartens, parks and libraries."
5. Materials
"Certain materials hold up especially well over time, from visual and/or structural perspectives, and they are not always the most expensive."
6. Additions
"...trees, parking lots, benches, playgrounds and sports facilities — serve as shared resources..."
7. Style
"Structural variations and details can add visual interest or aversion."
There's an excess of buttons ... —92 of them, to be exact, arranged on my nightstand in rubbery rows, seven different colors' worth, with overlapping labels that range in tone from clear and aggressive ("POWER," "FREEZE") to meek and mysterious ("SUR," "NAVI"). Following the model of usability expert Jakob Nielsen, I counted up the buttons I've actually pressed—not the ones I've pressed most often, but the ones I've pressed, period. The number was 34. I had a surplus of nearly five dozen....
So why should my television, a simple device that's not so interactive, spread so much clutter and confusion? Imagine if there were a separate door for each shelf of your refrigerator, and each of those doors had its own combination lock. That's the state of the modern entertainment center, and the hand-held devices we use to manipulate it. The remote control was supposed to make life easier, but instead it's led us into a labyrinth of bad design. How did we get here, and where are we going?