Comments on the Readings

Specific readings that have been useful and how I utilized them

1. Kostelnick examines two different approaches to visual design – culture specific and global. He argues that in every design situation we should locate our context somewhere on the continuum and design accordingly. With this MAPC group project, there has been a lot of discussion in my group about the culture of MAPC and how it doesn’t necessarily shine through to the general public. In addition, there are all of these little subcultures within MAPC (the rhetoric people, the web people, etc) and it’s really difficult to try to represent such a diverse group with one logo design. Our end design ended up as a logo that could be used for either a global (though global in this case probably wouldn’t include the entire globe) or culture specific audience. The image and text could be used together for the global audience and the image on its own (with just the MAPC lettering) is more culture-specific for our MAPC culture.
2. Kostelnick also discusses the importance of Gestalt principles, such as grouping and good continuation. Our logo incorporates both principles – good continuation because the rectangular shape is naturally continued by the eye, even though there isn’t an orange outline around all of it. Grouping is important because the two elements of the logo needed to be grouped in a way that they become one element.
3. Lupton explains that “design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking,” meaning that designers should pay attention to more than just the word, they should pay attention to the negative space around words and individual letters. In our MAPC logo, we worked with the spacing of individual letters and words as we imposed the phrase “master of arts” within the two words “Professional” and “Communication”. Also, we worked with the kearning on the letters to make sure that all 3 lines of text were the same width.
4. Lupton also discusses the linearity of printed texts and suggests different accommodations that must be made in online environments where users are approaching texts from different directions in nonlinear formats (lets all think about orals and how this connects to Burbles and Nielsen…and Burke…and…I should stop now…). She suggests the importance of keeping certain expected visual conventions, such as banners and hyperlinks (which, of course, are set off differently than the rest of the type). As we worked on our web design we considered ways to include hyperlinks as visually different aspects of the page than the regular text. We also considered our font selection carefully to make sure that it was both readable on screen and commonly accessible to our users. And, speaking of typography, we might consider the use of the bar | as a fun little web convention that typically indicates separation between linked elements.
5. One of the most important books to me in this class and for my MAPC project is Krug’s book. There are elements from this book throughout our website design for this class: breadcrumbs, logo links home, subnavigation is in a prominent location, grouping of common elements, etc. In addition, like Lupton also notes, we stuck to the general visual conventions users would expect to find on a website.