Designer Eye for the Geek Guy/Gal
Tags:
CMS: Any
Thursday - 1:45pm - Thursday - 4:00pm
Description:
In meetings and lectures across the globe, people are made to endure hideous presentation slides featuring some of the wildest colors, clip art and typography. Many websites are so confusingly laid out, that you get dizzy from the overload of boxes, images or links. And every day, people receive resumés, invoices and ads ... *cue lightning and thunder* set in the Comic Sans font.
It's enough to make the average designer's hair turn blue, fall out, morph into a ninja and stab him/her in the eyes.
But, all hope is not lost! Contrary to popular belief, graphical design is not some arcane voodoo magic, but a straightforward discipline that values experience, reusability, elegance and good tools just like programming. Just like code, there are plenty of objective ways to measure the quality of a design. However, just like art is subjective, so may two programmers disagree on which implementation is the best. No designer is born with a genetic sense of proportion... it's just that while you were busy writing BASIC code on your C64, they were busy drawing superheroes.
I myself am an engineering geek who's never had any sort of formal design or art training, but has earned the title of "design nazi" on numerous occasions.
This session will teach geeks some basic principles about graphical design (especially on the web), from a geek perspective. This means we won't talk about "visually balanced design" but "here's a good approach to spacing". Soon, you'll be hearing the oooh's and aaah's when you don your designer hat.
Lead by:
Steven Wittens (personal website), Bryght Employee, Drupal core developer.
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Hi Steven, would you mind recording this in Drupal dojo style?
complete with screencast and audio (audio is skype)
http://groups.drupal.org/node/3097 has instructions
thank you!
Are you going to make the presentation available for the general public? I'm really interested in this.
We'll be posting the presentation on http://www.pingv.com .
Yes, we will be posting the presentation at http://pingv.com .
Excuse me -- I'm on the wrong thread. This is not a pingVision presentation.
I enjoyed this talk a lot. Very insightful, very interesting, and I ended up learning something, so I'm happy. A few comments though.
Regarding justified text. It has been shown that text that's justified against both margins is hard to read for persons with some kinds of reading or visual disabilities. The jagged right edge is sometimes used as an aid in following along.
Also, I'd like to mention word spacing used to avoid streams of white lines running down a paragraph when words on multiple lines end up having spacing at the same point. Jagged white space does improve readability.
Thanks for you effort! Drupal design is at a low state and scares many designers off. The D.O. web site really doesn't do Drupal justice and so many of the sites that people enthuse about are third-rate. Although I didn't get a chance to see your talk but took a look at your slides, I can tell that your work helped get people on the right track.
In the future (can you tell I'm a design professor?), however, you should take a look at Presentation Zen ( http://www.presentationzen.com/ ) (as should all Drupallers, esp. those who give presentations). Paring down your slides to no more than a slide a minute, ditching most of the text and instead putting together a set of stunningly designed visuals (compare your presentation to An Inconvenient Truth)... these would all be great things. A Presentation Zen approach might even give you some ideas for how to change Drupal design for the better.