atMedia: Great Design
Posted in Design on: Thursday, June 15, 2006 by Paul Boag
John Hicks, Cameron Moll, and Veerle Pietrers share their thoughts on what makes great design.
I was really looking forward to this session and was hopefully it would rekindle my enthusiasm for design. However, although it was an excellent presentation it has left me with a vague feeling of frustration.
The presentation basically looked at the three pillars of design:
- Typography
- Colour
- Grids
However it was their initial thoughts on design that had the greatest impact on me. In short, great design takes time. The more you can think through a design, the more iterations you go through, the better the design becomes. And therein lies my problem. When you are in a competitive tender situation it is often the time allocated for design that gets cut in an attempt to reduce the price of the project. I often find myself rushing design in an attempt to stay within budget. It can be a frustrating process.
What the presentation has done is inspired me to start pricing projects more realistically in order to ensure design gets the time it deserves.
4 Comments
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Anything interesting on web typography? I am conflicted on the ability to use more fonts (through css embeding, or whatnot) as I am sure people would end up using unreadable “grunge” fonts at every turn.
However, as of right now typography on the web is fairly limited short of using images or FIR.
Frustration! True, given enough iterations you can do great things and with technical expertise and great creative genes you can get there faster but it still comes down to money. Great design doesn’t neccesarily mean you made money. Paul Rand said he never worked on time; so much for the perfect world :-). I turn work down if I know it’s not going to work out; it’s been a long process to figure that out. I also take work that I may not make much on for reasons that are hard to describe.
For what it’s worth you have great skills you just have to convince other folks!
For me my job as a graphic designer it’s not only money, but my live. I like to create something unique.
For me my job as a graphic designer it’s not only money, but my live. I like to create something unique