Design is History

Posted by on . No comments.

I’ve been tasked with “select(ing) a designer you feel an affinity for and write 300 word evaluation”.
This should be an easy task, but the reality is i have an affinity to so many of the listed artists.
I have a particular love of art history, it was the subject of my dp2 flash project.

I may end up writing about more than one, since it is a toss-up between armin hofmann, aleksander Rodchenko and Barbara Kruger.
It would have also been nice to see Toulouse Lautrec on there too. Although a painter, he did use his skill for design purposes. His designs for the moulin rouge are stunning.

Anyway.

Aleksander Rodchenko

Aleksander Rodchenko is arguably my favourite designer. Though i can explain why he is a brilliant designer, i can’t exactly explain why he is my favourite. I have a particular affinity for Russian Modernist design through the cold war, which i feel is heavily influenced by his constructivist style. Cold War Modern at the V&A still remains my favourite exhibition and i thoroughly enjoyed Star City at Nottingham Contemporary, posters for both of which currently hang on the walls infront and behind me. Plus I thoroughly enjoyed learning the Russian language at school. I think i have a soft spot for all things Russian.

“Born in Russia in 1891 Rodchenko became an artist and designer of many mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, advertising and packaging. Heavily influenced by the upheaval surrounding the Russian revolution of 1917, he was one of the most prolific constructivist artists of the period. He was also a member of the Productivists, which pushed for the introduction of art into every day life, a concept which in many ways describes modern day graphic design”

I think that Rodchenko’s art encapsulates the energy of a nation which was going through a revolution at the time. The communist revolution was based on an ideology of a reachable utopia for the russian people. I think that Rodchenko’s experimental, progressive and optimism completely defines this.

” Most of his design work was for the Russian airline company Dobrolet, producing many packages, advertisements, logos and posters. His design work for other clients ranged from book covers to bookmarks, photo-montage and illustration, and even set and costume design for various Russian theaters.”

I enjoy that he isn’t defined by one media, much how i wish not to be defined purely by web. I love the photomontages that he’d produce and experimental use of photography and other media in his design work. I feel that with his work, he is experimenting every time. I like to imagine that he was a guy intrigued with everything and wanted to see how things work and what he could do with it. Photography was still a new art form, afterall.

What i really like about his design work is the feeling of movement. The way he experiments with colour, type and image and its form, really evokes a feeling of progress and movement within his work, which i feel is absolutely perfect for his work for the airline company Dobrolet.

I find his work highly influential on my own approach to design work. His use of primary colours, imagery and text is so very simple but i love the way he arranges them, his use of layout and typography is stunning.

As Design is History mentions, it is impossible to even begin to catalogue how many he influenced. But it goes without saying that the future of Communist art and design wouldnt have been the same without him and even swiss design pays homage to his use of typography, layout and photography in design.

Constantine and Lockwood Principles

Posted by on . One comment.

  • The structure principle: Design should organize the user interface purposefully, in meaningful and useful ways based on clear, consistent models that are apparent and recognizable to users, putting related things together and separating unrelated things, differentiating dissimilar things and making similar things resemble one another. The structure principle is concerned with overall user interface architecture.
  • The simplicity principle: The design should make simple, common tasks easy, communicating clearly and simply in the user’s own language, and providing good shortcuts that are meaningfully related to longer procedures.
  • The visibility principle: The design should make all needed options and materials for a given task visible without distracting the user with extraneous or redundant information. Good designs don’t overwhelm users with alternatives or confuse with unneeded information.
  • The feedback principle: The design should keep users informed of actions or interpretations, changes of state or condition, and errors or exceptions that are relevant and of interest to the user through clear, concise, and unambiguous language familiar to users.
  • The tolerance principle: The design should be flexible and tolerant, reducing the cost of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing, while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions.
  • The reuse principle: The design should reuse internal and external components and behaviors, maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency, thus reducing the need for users to rethink and remember.

Creating Widgetised Areas

Posted by on . No comments.

I’ve written previously on how to create custom sidebars, but what if we want the content in these sidebars to be dynamic? The Ollerton and Boughton Town Council website has a lot of content in potentially static areas, and this could become troublesome. Similarly, what if you want to use widgets in particular locations? To do this, we have to create widgetised areas.

The image above shows how the town council site has sections of content which need to either by dynamic, or be widgetised in order for a plugin to work. The three sections of text are called from the footer, while it is possible that this text could be maintained as static, this would mean the council would be unable to change this text in the future. As a result it makes sense to have these sections activated as widgets, that way the client can maintain this sections as “static blocks” of text in the back end. Similarly, I am using the Mailchimp Plugin to pull through a sign up form in the footer. I have the Mailchimp plugin activated, but then you have to drop the Mailchimp Widget into the desired area of the site. This meant creating a widgetised area in the footer where the form would go.

So now we understand the need for them, how do we actually create them?

Firstly we have to register sidebars in the functions.php document. You will see in the screenshot that it declares (6) sidebars, this is pretty self explanatory, as there are 6 sidebars in use. However if you are only using one sidebar, you do not have to declare a number.

The usefulness of the numbers is not only to tell WordPress you have 6 widgetised areas, but also so you can label them in number order.

As you can see, I have declared them sidebar 4, 5 & 6, this conveniently corresponds with the back end, so when it comes to adding your functionality, you know which one to add your content to.

Finally, in appearance > widgets, I am given a list of the available widgetised areas and also a list of available widgets. I am then able to simply drop a widget into these areas and it will function. So for example, by dropping a text widget into these areas, I am able to write the text into these sections and it will appear in the footer. So this means the text in these sections can be changed instantly.