In this article Ellen Lupton brings the attention to the rise of interface and usability design. Human-computer interaction (HCI) reflect that the dominant subject is the user. User are to studied and how text used since it reflects more the user has been and gathers data about the audience.
There are a couple of myths or theories about visual communication and how they relate to user interactivity.
Myth 1: Readers on the web are less patience than readers of print?
Truth: Studies proved that the crisp black text on white background van be read just as efficiently from screen as from a printed page.
Myth 2: Users of websites have different expectations than print users
Truth: Website users want to feel contemplative, they expect search mode not processing or contemplating.
Myth 3: Icons are a more universal mode of communication than text.
Truth: Icons are necessary yet text can often provide a more specific and understandable cue than a picture. Icons function more to enforce brand identity, besides text allows to be reformatted and translated and used in different media.
Myth4: "White space" open space on a page can have as much physical presence as printed areas.
Truth:Mixed opinions modern designers believe that open space have presence but advocates like Edward Tufte, believe in visual density argues for maximizing the amount of data on a single page or screen. I think the importance is not the amount but the organization if is well organized I wouldn't personally mind going through several text.
Design has become a "transmedia" enterprise, as authors and producers create worlds, characters, places, situations and interactions appear across a variety of media and products.
Graphic Authorship by Rick Poynor
"Designer as author" even though is a postmodern ideas. The role of the designer has not just been to invoke the reader or viewer , but also get the involvement of the audience. In the reading, the author mentions that "the acto of designing can never be an entirely neutral proces, since the designer always brings something extra to the project. A designers role is to inform, reflect personal taste, cultural understanding, social and political beliefs and aesthetic preferences. Designers are motivated by the need for creative satisfaction and peer approval.
Canadian designer Bruce Mau, has a preferred model to when a designer should take a role for instance in a book project. In Mau's version he sees the involvement of the designers during the project's inception, sometimes alongside the writer. Example of this model is when Mau collaborated with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, on the cover of the book Mau and Koolhaas had the same degree of recognition, which has been achieved by few designers. Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller are two significant designers that emerge in 1980's embracing designer and author. In their design practice the made this commitment explicit in the three-word manifesto (1985) which they titled it design|writing|research. Lupton and Miller demonstrated how writing and design might be brought together in a new critical relationship, in which a graphic designer could be conceived as a language-worker equipped to actively initiate projets by either authorizing text or by elaborating, directing or disrupting their meaning. Postmodern graphic authorship as described in the article is a designer that has full control over the text, as commissioner, editor or writer.
Fuel makes the distinction between client and personal work as, client work usually involves compromises over content that need not to be made in self-initiated projects. This may come to the nature of the content itself.
-SVA (School of Visual Arts, in NYC is the first school to provide a degree based on the "idea of the designer as author" is rooted in the independent creation of ideas.
Authorship is a term that has a lot of problems in regards of ownership and credit, but it does open the road for possibilities and thinking how design transcends and is not limited. Ellen Lupton also makes the point that designers are producers, designer finds opportunities to seize control of the technological means of production and share this control with the reading public.
The Designer as Producer by Victor Margolin
Available is a new networking approach to the production of goods and services and therefore making the accessibility to resources quicker. Due to this emerging marketing structure, designer today have the opportunity to produce and distribute new things at low costs. Like typefaces with the market, it can allow a young typographer to become an entrepreneur. Designers/ entrepreneurs can do more than challenge the system of industrial production, by using technology for modeling, prototyping, manufacturing and distributing new products. Designers can address the need of new products to address pressing social needs (health, children, communication, the aged, those with disabilities) that are not being met by large manufacturers. Designers/ entrepreneurs have the opportunity to create and have an impact in the product culture than we have ever had in the past.
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