The Non-Designer's Design Book...aka A Bunch of CRAP :)

After reading Williams' principles of design, I found myself thinking back to projects I created for past classes, as well as some other creative things I have made, and I have to admit I'm rather embarrassed. I am now aware that what I thought looked good at the time is completely wrong in so many ways. The first image that came to my mind was of a slide show I created last semester. I am mortified that I actually showed it in front of my class and used it for a presentation (I always wondered why I didn't get as good of a grade as I had expected). I was the type of designer that was afraid of leaving too much open space. I used way too many pictures that ended up being more distracting and overwhelming than useful. Instead of choosing colors that were pleasing to the eye or made sense for the content, I chose colors based on what I thought was pretty (bright, flashy, pink). The list of my problems goes on and on. This reading made me wish I could go back in time and fix all of my major design mistakes (I would post an example of my horrible slide show but I prefer to pretend it never existed).

What I really like about Williams is that she not only explains her basic principles of design well, but she also backs them up with plenty of examples to help the reader visualize what she means. I found that technique very helpful for me. She also makes it easy on us by having a memorable acronym that can be applied to any design. CRAP is pretty self explanatory and can be used as a mental checklist so that whenever you design something, you can easily make sure you cover the most important principles. I found it amazing how sometimes the smallest changes in design made the biggest difference. There were many great points made about design, but one thing that stood out to me the most was: Don't be afraid to make a bold statement (aka go big or go home).

But even though Williams says it's good to be bold, there is such thing as over-doing it. You never want any part of your design to be distracting and take away from what you're really trying to get across. Take this random website for example. The graphic is repeated in an annoying and excessive way, and the font style and color fail to contrast, making the text very difficult to read because everything blends in with the background.

Basically I could make a long list of design don'ts, but we all read the book so we already know what they are. Just take a look at this website I found and you will see everything you should NOT do.

Everything is Miscellaneous Ch.3-4

I think that we have come a long way since the Dewey Decimal System (just a side note, but I thought it was interesting that he was born in Adams Center, NY). The 3rd order of organization, like with Amazon, is great for someone like me who needs many choices and possibilities. Amazon works for me because I usually do not know exactly what it is I am looking for, and the website acts like my personal friend that guides me to wherever or whatever I want. The Potsdam Library's website is also helpful for me and something I use all of the time. I use it often when doing research for a class or particular paper because I can go to that one place and have many resources available to me at the same time. I can search for all sorts of things, books, articles, e-books, media sources, etc., and not only from my library, but libraries worldwide as well. I can also use the features to narrow or broaden my searches. It works when I know exactly what I am looking for, and it helps when I have a topic/subject in mind, but have no idea what there is out there that could be useful to me.

I am not very knowledgeable about the web, and I do not spend a lot of time just searching the Internet (therefore some of the examples I come up with may be new and exciting to me but old news to everyone else--I apologize in advance). But the "faceted classification system" seems like a convenient way of organizing things in order to find something because it makes the searching part easy and painless, and it allows you to find exactly what you need. While browsing the Everything is Miscellaneous blog, I came across a site called the Carrot2 Clustering Engine. The site's description says it "organizes your search results into topics. With an instant overview of what's available, you will quickly find what you're looking for." It looks similar to google, but when you type in whatever you are looking for, a tree visualization is presented alongside your search results. Although it is new to me, it seems like it works with the Amazon example discussed in the chapter we read. I would need to mess around on it for a while in order to talk about it more, but maybe it is something you could check out or something that could be useful to you.

I would also like to add that I just stumbled across another website to mention (now that I am doing more searching, or rather paying more attention to different types of sites for the purposes of this class). The website is new to me, but may not be to you. Anyways, it is called Searchme: Visual Search. It seems to work like any other search engine, but the sites are shown visually instead of just listed. By categorizing the web, the site's goal is for searchers to get to the ir results with the least amount of effort and in the fastest way. You can search whatever you want, and then click on certain icons that are on the site (that vary by what you are searching, for example, SUNY Potsdam icons are libraries, economics, history, colleges, etc.), and then you will be taken to whatever icon you clicked on but within your original search. So when I typed in SUNY Potsdam, I was able to see Potsdam's homepage. When I clicked on the soccer icon, I was taken to Potsdam's athletic page, when I clicked on libraries, I was then taken to Potsdam's library page, and so on. This site allows you to see what you are searching before you keep clicking back and forth on useless sites. I think this is a cool site because I have not seen anything like it before, and it is neat to see how visual design keeps impacting nearly everything.