Kerning

From the universal power of story-telling to the mind's ability to find order in the chaos of sense perception, rich cognitive principles drive the design process. Theories of perception and cognition help us understand how people see and react to images and interfaces. Designers can use these theories to create inventive forms and concepts that surprise, delight, and entice the viewer. Principles of the mind—from the laws of Gestalt to theories of narrative, behavior, and how to tell a joke—shed light on how design works and how to make it better.

As designers we are living the most interesting and challenging age of the news industry. The technology used in writing is undergoing a huge transformation, addressing itself to a multitude of languages. The great challenge of our time is to combine different languages, in order to increase knowledge and understanding, to inform and clarify. According to Franchi, reporting is not merely filing a story once, but rather telling a continuous narrative in a way that is most relevant for a broad range of traditional and digital media—from breaking news to analysis, from interviews to commentaries, from photo essays and illustrations to information graphics and interactive visualizations of data.

Typography on the web has made huge leaps forward in recent years, allowing web designers to realize their designs with an almost print-like level of control. However, the details surrounding that control can still be challenging, and bleeding-edge technology like OpenType support is still in flux. In this talk, Typekit’s Creative Director and 8 Faces founder Elliot Jay Stocks takes attendees through some of the most exciting recent developments that allow us to take web-based typography to the next level.

Words are vessels of thought and culture. As our words jump from screen to page, medium to medium, it becomes a designer’s task to develop design approaches and typographic systems that can elegantly retain their integrity from place to place, while using each format’s advantages. Content moves in both directions: we can use the connectivity of digital to invigorate printed material, but also use the uniformity of the printed page to stabilize digital content. It’s a difficult task, but we have examples. I’ll track patterns back into television, documentaries, and paperbacks to look for clues about how to take advantage of this decade’s big design opportunity.

Vincent Connare will discuss the projects he has worked on all his career that have always been an answer or solution to a software problem or need.

Designers try desperately to make work that’s impactful—to create work that will leave people breathless and hungry for more. Young designers in particular are endlessly trying to impress, their designs scream “DESIGN!”, their type choices are bold, their color palettes are disruptive. Many designers carry this momentum throughout there careers, but there are a few that begin to see differently. Instead of focusing on the flash, they hone in on the details, noticing things that others can barely perceive. Does this make their work better? Does it make it boring? Jessica will guide you through her own work and show you what happens when the small and imperceptible becomes even more exciting than the big bright and flashy.

There was a time when graphic design was about high ideals: improving people’s lives; providing safety and guidance; defying capitalist greed; saving the world. We could use some of that today. The world has become so complex, and the flow of information so overwhelming, that it would be really helpful if designers used their skills to expose its mechanisms — daring to be funny, incisive and irreverent. But most of us cannot cope with so much content. We lecture each other about kerning, M-dashes, apostrophes and Comic Sans. Students revel in cool Klein blue and hipster irony. Professionals complain about the fonts in iOS 7. We consume as if our lives depend on it. Have we painted ourselves into a corner, or can we still design our way out?

Erik will introduce some small research projects. The first: some things to keep in mind about when drawing small details: type for reading sizes is designed to be at the edge of the average eye can see. But what does that mean - and look like? The second: the absolute precision of our digital tools does not mean we all draw the same. The results of a survey. Also a quick introduction to Superpolator3.