As Wendy Maynard article "Good design makes good sense" states "Well-designed materials become even more important as their complexity grows. For instance, an ad typically gets someone's attention for five seconds. In contrast, a brochure has the potential to claim much more of your prospect's time and commitment. Hand a customer a poorly-formatted, hard-to-read piece and you may lose them forever".
So is good design really as simple as organizing your shoe collection? Well, not quite. Here is a checklist to follow, according to Maynard, for your next project. Structure and time your piece correctly, and brace yourself for informed customers who are ready to do business with your company.
Five Basics of Good Design
1. Never obscure your message. The KISS (Keep It Simple, Smarty) rule applies equally well to writing copy, creating graphics, and choosing a format.
2. Work backwards from your goal to your marketing piece. Listen to your customers' needs before you make a decision about how to fill them. A website may not initially appeal to you as a tool, but if your customer base is using the Internet, it may be a great way to deliver your message.
3. Present similar kinds of information in similar ways. People love to look for patterns. And we feel good when we find them, so let your customers in on that happy feeling. Chances are it will help them retain your information better and use it more effectively.
4. Save special effects for the 4th of July. Just because you can print in all caps in that cool new font, it doesn't mean you should. Readability wins out over gimmicks every time.
5. Be practical and be dedicated. Consider all the steps involved in a project, from the time you spend creating it all the way through to postage or follow-up calls. Commit to following through on every item or your project may not succeed.
I haven't recently thought that we live with good design every day. What a great analogy, organising pens and pencils, or sorting out our clothes!
ReplyDeleteWith the 'five basics', are they specific to a particular type of design, like web design? I'm not sure they would apply in a primary classroom in art lessons, but I can see how they would be used when learning about technology, creating web pages, blogs etc.
What are your views on allowing children to experiment with special effects and different elements in a program? Not being very creative myself when it comes to creating artwork, I'm of the mind that I will allow my students to be as obvious or obscure as they decide to be when designing a piece, but I can see from this point of view that that approach may not necessarily always be the best one to follow.
Finally, I would just like you to know that, because of your point about good design, I will be appreciating the ease with which I make my toast tomorrow morning because I have a toaster that is a good design:)
Thanks Jo for your comment!!
ReplyDeleteThe 'five basics' can be used within any area of design.
-Step number 1 'KISS' keeping it simple, smarty can be applied to any situation from design your living space to designing a webpage for your business. If you overcrowd your design you are going confuse and put off your intended audience.
- Step number 2 working backwards from your goal can be applied to designing a website, a poster or even a book. You need to be aware of what your intend goal/end product is before you can begin to design. You need to listen to your customers in any marketing campaign as they are the people who are going to buy/ or enjoy your product.
- Step 3 when you are designing a website or a book for instance you don't want each page to be designed differently. If you are reading a children's book and one page has watercolour pictures and then the next graphic picture and the next page has chalk pictures, you are going to confuse and put off your reader and intended audience. You want to design your product; webpage, posters etc, with the same colouring, layout and text.
- Step 4 same again keep it simply!! time is precious in today's busy world and if a webpage has things shooting across the page and special effects everywhere your intended audience is not going to waste time trying to get through the special effects just to get some information.
- Step 5 start small.it is the same in all areas of design. If you are redecorating your house instead of pulling apart 3 room all at the same time and trying to allocate your time to all three, start with one. The same goes with a business instead of starting with designing a webpage that has lots of different products and pages start small then expand as every product/page is going to be needed to followed up, packing and posting.
You could use these principles when designing an art lesson or any lesson at that. Start simple, know your goal and intended audience, present your lesson in a coherent and structured manner as to not confuse your audience, if you try and flare up your lesson you could just end up confusing your students more, keeping in simple has more of a chance of having lasting results and lastly be practical, time management how long do you have to complete the lesson, do you have time to follow up on the task if students don't finish and do you have time to evaluate the students to see if your goal has been achieved.
My view is is allow students to be creative to explore programs and design. I will allow my students to be creative as they wish and i will encourage them to push the 'rules' of design. But i think there is also time and place for flare/special effects depending on your intended goal/target audience.
Thank you for your comments and as writing this post i have reiterate my view to on design to myself and have also been able to make more of an connecting to the classroom. :-)