I really enjoyed this assignment because it served several purposes; to learn about influential designers, to practice using proper leading, to continue working on typographic rags and widows, and to make use of the basic grid.

The goal was not to be design savvy at the time, or to particularly learn something. It happened on accident, really. I was blessed with several people along the way who were somewhat design competent, and had already been down the same sloppy road I was going to fork down into, and eventually (the hard way,) I got to where I am today. Today, I am not the best on the planet, or even in the top ranks, but I do fully intend on getting there.

Until I started getting a formal education, in comparison to before, I didn’t know squat about design. My graphic art was purely done out of necessity, observation, and boredom, to be honest. The school semester that just passed was empowering, challenging, and vigorous. For a project this semester I had to design a book on Herbert Matter (a designer) and compile research about him into this book. I didn’t write the book, I placed the text and images into it, using a creative process. Describing that seems so simple, and easy, when quality graphic design is actually by no means simple, even though it can seem so. People say one thing that designers are known best for is simplifying just about everything. (One reason I can’t make anything I do sound particularly interesting, I guess.) There were many sleepless nights during this school year: I would call my close friends, after a long night of work, completely exhausted and overworked, and most of my friends couldn’t actually fathom this or understand what effort design takes, or how I could possibly be so tired doing what seems like child’s play.

Not like I don’t get enough crap from being an art school student, but it sucks sometimes to not be understood by those closest to you, or even in general. I could sit here and rant all day about why a graphic design IS a REAL profession, and cry about how none cares to understand the integrity of design, or I could try to simply educate. I picked up a few quotations that I felt effectively get the idea of graphic design across, and could possibly do some justice:

“What is graphic design? Graphic Design is the most universal of all the arts. It is all around us, explaining, decorating, identifying: imposing meaning on the world. It is in the streets, in everything we read, it is on our bodies. We engaged with design in road signs, advertisements, magazines, cigarette packets, headache pills, the logo on our t-shirt, the washing label on our jacket.” (What is Graphic Design? by Quentin Newark, pg. 6)

“Graphic design is the business of making or choosing marks and arranging them on a surface to convey an idea.” – Richard Hollis (What is Graphic Design? by Quentin Newark, pg. 12)

“…graphic design, in the end, deals with the spectator, and because it is the goal of the designer to be persuasive or at least informative, it follows that the designer’s problems are twofold: to anticipate the spectator’s reactions and to meet his own aesthetic needs.” – Paul Rand (What is Graphic Design? by Quentin Newark, pg. 12)

“All design has to give shape to its raw material, sequence it, order and sort it, give it hierarchy. The material forms of design – books, posters, signs, packages, webpages – insist that something needs to be read first, seen first.” (What is Graphic Design? by Quentin Newark, pg. 14)

“Graphic design is a creative process that combines art and technology to communicate ideas. The designer works with a variety of communication tools in order to convey a message from a client to a particular audience. The main tools are image and typography.” (What is Graphic Design? by AIGA, aiga.org, para. 3)

Graphic design is not simply here “to make things look pretty,” it is meant to be functional, and to convey a clear message. The title “graphic design” is interchangeable with “visual communication.” Just as your weather man on TV, graphic designers are communicators. We just choose use art as our medium.

To elaborate on these some, I found it odd that Blurb offers PDF to Book but “dummy-proofs” the pagination, pdf exporting, and binding. Using InDesign, at least what I assume, is rather advanced and complex for the general public who have signed up to make family photo albums. I found myself guessing on the pagination the whole time I was working with Blurb– they charge you by how many pages you are printing, and give you increments of 20 to choose from (IE: 10-20, 20-40, 40-60, and so on..) when you are in InDesign, and you are designing for double sided printing, it can get a little confusing. I asked myself “Do you select the 20-40 range if you have a total of 80 pages front and back?” Just to be clear, the answer is no. You want to select the number of sheets you have listed in InDesign, blurb does not consider pages, it considers sheets. Also, if you are in some sort of time crunch (like i was,) make sure that you check your email right after you upload your files, even if you’ve already ordered their product. Errors may show up, and which will put your books production to a halt. In the chance that you have to re-upload any of your PDF’s, you will have to cancel your first order/transaction and start all over. I surely hope that Blurb fixes this detail in the future, because I think that was the most confusing bit.

But so far, so good. Comparatively the pros and cons are only slightly different from dealing with an in-person printer, there’s no real way of getting rid of the hustle and bustle of service bureaus. I have no idea how my book will come out, I have not received it yet, but as soon as I do, I will be posting another update with photos. I will note the quality of the book then.

Update: Received my book in the mail today, overall, I’m very impressed with the Imagewrap cover, would definitely recommend it. The matter ProLine paper is alright, I’ve been working with MOAB by Legion Kayenta (205) recently, so I may be a little spoiled right now, but I feel like the color wasn’t as vibrant as it could have been. The binding is nice, the spine seems like it will last a while. The paper is cut well, very precise. Imagewrap does alter the design placement a bit, so you want to be conscious of this when working on a design. View photos of my book here.

I know that this is something common for graphic design schools to do, so for the integrity of my work, I have watermarked this. This is an exported PDF, it is high quality, and printable (legibly) on 11 x 17 paper. The information is taken straight from Megg’s History of Graphic Design, this is meant to be used as a reference.

meggs_graphic_timeline_.pdf

To download, right click the picture or link above and press “Save (Linked) File As…”
To print, the password is “AGREE” (as in you agree not to use my work as your own )

Today, I thought it would be pretty cool to make a twitter where I can share my random tidbits– they are usually blurt out as one-liners, so what’s better than a 140 character limit for this? Follow @sillyingredient on twitter to get my daily, design-related random facts!