I asked my design colleagues how they would define graphic design. The same thing always happened, you could see the initial response was always the confident “oh that’s easy” face turning quickly into the disconcerted face after they realized that graphic design is not that definite.

Defining Graphic Design is a daunting task in itself. After the past five weeks of paying close attention to graphic design being defined in may different ways and I don’t find the task any less overwhelming. In fact, I think it may be vaster than originally imagined.

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Have you ever had one of those “ideas meetings” where the ideas seemed few and far between? The energy was flat? The air was stale? If this sounds familiar the next time you have one of these meetings try to implement the design-thinking method Stoke from Bootcamp Bootleg material from Standford’s d school.

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As I thought about my concept map for the GRDS 701 literary Review project, it made me think of Graphic Facilitation at meetings. What is Graphic Facilitation? Well maybe this images can help…

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I love color! I love color theory, it was color theory that hooked me into design. I was always interested in the psychology of color and what color can do to an audience. I studied Josef Alber’s Color theory and through his explorations of color values and relationships, I learned of the multiple innovative ways for the viewer to comprehend color and the paintings Albers developed.

This week I have been watching TED Talks and I saw one that was titled I Listen to Color. I had to watch it. The speaker was Neil Harbisson, he was interesting looking. He was wearing a hot pick coat, blue shirt and yellow shirt but more interesting then his clothes was his opening statement about how he can hear color and how he collaborated with computer scientists to create a electronic eye that is a color sensor that then sends a sound frequency to a chip in the back of his head.

Click to go to the TED Talk

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There was big news in my office this week, people in my department we sharing emails and videos all about USA Today and their redesign. This was particularly interesting since our magazine went through a redesign last year and we can understand the pain and long hours the design team over at USA Today had to put in, in order to get the redesign finished all at once.

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As I was reading and thinking about the course and what the current discourse (Poggenpohl, 218) of Graphic Design Seminar: Methodologies would be, I kept thinking how different this is from any learning experience I have had. I took classes online but never fully online where there wasn’t at least one in person meeting. Continue reading →

I can remember the exact moment I fell in love with graphic design. It reminds me of the moment in a John Hughes movie that you can’t help but swoon over, both achingly melodramatic and larger than life in the simplest of terms. I was in my foundations class in undergrad; we were discussing color theory and the rules for effectively evoking the appropriate reader’s reaction. I remember thinking there was so much to learn about effectively communicating and that there were many different tools you could use to provoke feeling or a response and I wanted to know everything about it.

What does Graphic Design mean to me? I have had many influences of what graphic design means to me. School, family, work and culture have all impacted my thoughts around the subject.

I was taught by my professors that the definition of graphic design is a message, idea, or thought that is conveyed to an audience through a creative process and produced in a visual form.

I was told by my parents that Graphic Design was the lesser of the evil when considering “art degrees”. The part of art that would leave you to be a “starving artist”.

During my early years of work I was made aware by work that graphic design was using templates. Almost like a fill-in the blanks with information I was given. I started to miss what I had fell in love with. I was bored and not learning.

I went back to school and learned a new aspect of design, interactive and social media design! Design once again energized me, it was knew, exciting and different. How to get the viewers attention? The attention that is everything but lasting. This was a challenge however a challenge that everyone took part in, design was now something you could Google and pay $9.95 for a template or … (gasp)… do it yourself. Almost like McSweeney’s article about how Instagram has made everyone a professional photographer.

Finally with a different job, I am faced with new (or different) design challenges. I again change what graphic design means to me. I will say this, through out this journey one thing has never changed, my wanting to know everything about it, as it changes and grows I hope I can change and grow with it.