I’ve been thinking a lot about why I want to be a designer. I guess it’s because I’m close to graduating (2 more quarters to go!) and I feel like I need a sense of purpose. But why do I love design rather than engineering, marketing, or business?
Well, after much thought, I realized one thing: design serves people. Ideally, design is user-centered, user-driven, user-focused. We design for humans, and we design to make enable those humans. A good design doesn’t just help the user complete a task, but achieve a goal.
Engineers, on the other hand, are concerned with efficiency (in my—admittedly limited—experience). Marketers, salespersons, and businessmen are concerned with, well, sales, business, and the market, i.e. money. That’s not to say that engineers and businessmen don’t help people, just that their job isn’t centered around helping the user. One profession I can think of that also serves humans is medicine.
I want to help people. I guess that’s one reason why I want to be a designer.
I often find myself unprepared for a situation. I can’t think of a better way to put it. I’ll want to take a picture, write something down, sketch an idea, or just kill time, and all I have on me are my keys, wallet, and cell phone. I need a go bag for my gear.
My friend Adam swears by his Chrome messenger bag (well, he really likes it). But the price turns me off… $135 can get you a lot of other nice stuff…
Maybe I’m just being a tightwad. But I want to make a project out of this. I’m thinking of designing and making my own bag, tailored to suit my needs. If anything, it’ll be a fun sketch project. I’ve never really sketched bags… unless you count that one intro project… but we don’t talk about that……..
I have found that I am quite fond of typography. I enjoy looking at libraries of typefaces. I like reading about the history of a typeface. I try my best to use type well.
The I Love Typography blog is a great place to go to if you find yourself strangely entertained by all things type-related. There are many articles for beginners and experts, as well as interviews and tutorials. The best thing is the community feedback, and the discussions that take place in the comments. Great fun.
Well, there’s also a series on the site called “So you want to create a font” (here’s parts one and two). Inspired by that series, and by some sketches of type that I saw on the site and around the web, I sketched some characters in my little A5 sketchbook.
Yes, that’s my attempt at a Helvetica ‘a’ on the top left. You know, you wouldn’t expect it, but sketching letters is fun.
This geometric type looked easy to vectorized, so I fired up Illustrator and started constructing. I ended up with the word ‘can’.
Looks alright. I think I need to sketch the rest of the alphabet before I vectorize it. Those lines in the back are the shapes I used to construct the characters.
This one I tried to trace in Illustrator, but it killed the entire character of the font. I really like how it looks in the sketch, and I’ve drawn out some more letters and they look good. I guess I also need to carefully draw the whole alphabet for this one, and do it larger.
The best thing about this is, it’s got me sketching more. Sketching is good :-)
I finally got round to updating my Coroflot profile with some work. It’s not much, but it’s something. I’ll be putting more up there in the weeks to come.
I’ve just upgraded to Wordpress 2.3, and changed the theme (obviously). I’ve also been working on a new look for my site, which you can check out at nourmalaeb.com/portfolio. None of the links work, but I’m getting there. When I’m not doing schoolwork.
“Happy Pills is a sweet shop on a narrow plot in central Barcelona, designed by Spanish practice M. The shop, a tongue-in-cheek homage to traditional pharmacies, was designed to appeal specifically to adults in a busy shopping and tourist area with few school children.”
