Thursday, the 22nd of November

22.11.2012

Slogan of the day: Designing is inserting logic into space

- Designing the brochure take all day. Thankfully there were no other tasks or concerns I should deal with, so I was left alone with my thoughts and photoshop layers. After I came up with background design this Tuesday I thought that putting all the contents into it would be disgustingly easy. I was wrong - when it came to putting the contents (texts, pictures, etc.) I realized that finding the logic for its organization IS the main task of this work. At first, too saturated colors of a background distracted me. I was fruitlessly trying to somehow put text and contents inside those two blue twists, and could not make them look organically. I was thinking that the background is my main organizing structure, a carcass of a sort, when in fact it was just an unostentatious visual tone, like a kind of jazz melody that you hear while sitting in a bar or restaurant and having a conversation with a friend. The main focus must be on the conversation, since it is the reason that motivated you to visit a bar in the first place, jazz melody in the background is just comforting you unconsciously, making your stay here more pleasant and leasurous. Same was with the visual design of the brochure: to really have the needed effect my super-awesome design must stay almost invisible, only making view sliding more comfortable and pleasant.

- With competing the background and pushing it on, well, the background, I suddenly understood how roomy my brochure can actually be and how much unorganized space I have to deal with. I've started to experiment with it. My first steps were very vague and clumsy. There were stupid blue boxes all over the place - and then I added orange for more diversity, and then... Don't remember how it all went up, but at some point I realized that some general logic should cover every one of the design elements, or else they will fall apart and look very unpleasant and eclectic. I experimented with gray banners for the heading, and find out that with the little colored block in near the page edge it will look much more consistent and convincing. I don't even know exactly why: maybe because with it the banner looks like a kind of menu or option that pops up when you push that little bright colored buttons near the top or side of a web page with, say, live chat option? Anyway, the banner started to look just the way I wanted, and that is - ORGANICALLY, or NATURALLY, if you will. This was my revelation of the day, and later I summarized it in a single phrase: designing means adjusting any kind of logic to any kind of space. In my case the space was visually perceiving blank of the brochure, but what was the logic? Logic is not something you look at (logic doesn't care about variables - that is why even the most absurd phrases, if they are constructed logically correct, can be nevertheless be truthful), rather it is something that makes you look at something in one way or another. It's a principle of seeing, perceiving and making sense of something. And it is the main thing in design.