What makes people want to create art, design brochures, or study feng shui? I think we are compelled to recreate nature, because we’re part of it.

People find great beauty, peace, drama, and connection in nature. Everything on the earth is interconnected, literally by the earth itself, and it’s organized, just like our bodies are composed of organized, interconnected cells. The world and our bodies are full of form, color, pattern, and purpose. We recreate these qualities in music, on fabric, in poetry, and in writing, and we search for patterns to understand more about the world through science and astronomy.

Today feels pretty warm, and I might go outside in DDA’s back yard to sit on a bench and eat my lunch. It would be great if the wall to my office could slide open on a nice sunny day, or if I took more breaks to walk.

In some ways much of my home and work environment is artificial in the sense that it is man-made, but in a very real way, as I sit in my office at a computer creating brochures, I also feel connected to nature.

Last night I watched part of a movie, “What A Way To Go.” The subject matter was serious, very well documented, and the presentation was poetic.

My friend asked, “Do you think that movie was done artistically?” I said, emphatically, “Yes.”

The movie, which consists of a collage of images and interviews, has a consistent background ambience created by music and old movie clips.

However, I mentioned that it looked low budget, and that perhaps it was taken with someone’s home camera. This doesn’t matter to me at all, and did not take away from my enjoyment of the movie or how artistic I think it is, but my friend, who also thinks highly of the movie, felt I was being insulting.

I tried to explain that I was just making a observation, based on seeing many movies, that if the producer created more movies and had better equipment, it would appear more technically “slick.”

Technical skills are very important at DDA, and DDA’s writers, graphic designers, web designers, and videographers pay close attention to them. Although technical skills may be grasped intuitively by some people, if not, it’s no problem, because they can always be learned.

From my work illustrating academic textbooks before I was hired by DDA, I learned many technical copywriting details, like what is the proper minus sign to use in an equation, to add a space before and after an equal sign, and to use straight instead of curly quotation marks for measurements.

DDA’s writers know the rules of grammer, but what makes their writing interesting is their creativity. Likewise, as a designer, I must be aware of rules about typography, what font size to use on websites, how to photomanipulate an image, and what colors are best for certain markets. But all of these rules would be useless if they weren’t fueled by creativity.

Here at DDA, we are all driven by a desire to create interesting and quality work, and that provides great motivation to learn the technical details!

One thing graphic designers get very excited about is “white space,” or the empty space on a page around images, in the gutter, on the edges, between lines of type, in the middle of a big letter “O.” Expertly used, white space (or any other solid block of color) acts as a frame, grouping the content on the page into distinct areas that can be more easily digested. Like how a bright blue sky sets of a few fluffy clouds, like the spacious feeling standing in an old building with 10 foot ceilings, or like the ocean reflecting the setting sun’s rays.

White space can make clients nervous.

They look at the half inch of space here and there, add them together, and fear the space may be wasted, underutilized… When we ask for feedback on the design, the client may look at these slices of white and exclaim, “My, what big white space you have!”

The graphic designer grins and says, “The better to see your message with.”

But unlike big bad wolves, DDA’s graphic designers can be trusted. For one thing, our teeth are much smaller, and well-flossed. We don’t want to gobble up all of the important content with our big white space. We want the client’s message to be experienced as if it is an elegant, balanced, seven-course meal, not as an overpriced raisin on a plate, or an overloaded buffet.

I was always intrigued by the idea of assuming a different personality. What fun it would be to take that to the extreme, almost becoming another person, like in the movie Freaky Friday, and find out what the world looks like from a different perspective.

Well, in some way, I get to do that at DDA, when I work on files that have been designed by someone else.

Yesterday I updated a website designed by someone else, so that the menu looks more bold and prominent. DDA did not design this website, but we do updates and some maintenance. It may have been created a couple of years ago, when the average screen resolution was lower (800 x 600), because as the average screen resolution has increased to 1024 x 768, type appears smaller.

I generally use a slightly larger font size now when designing websites, because it’s easier to read at a higher screen resolution. So, in a way, I got to be an actor for a day.

The website was the stage-set, and from there I got to improvise a script!

Today I am creating a trade show graphic. It will be an addition to three other pop-up graphics we have already created for this company for a past trade show. Their goal for this trade show is to attract employees as the company expands, and this will be the main message for the graphic I create.

Besides delivering a message, another function for trade show graphics can be as part of the trade show booth’s “set design,” creating a background mood through colors and images. Those kinds of graphics are especially fun to create because they can be painterly through the use of collage and texture, sometimes having no text at all.

Trade show graphics have a unique set of requirements for their composition. For example, most of the message usually needs to be toward the top of the banner, if it stands on the floor. The bottom part of the graphic is often partially obstructed by a booth table or pedestal, and of course, people standing in front of it.

The text for a trade show graphic must be large enough to be readable at a standing distance, and succinct, to catch people’s attention as they walk by or look around admidst the hustle and bustle of a trade show.

Because of the large physical size of a trade show graphic, the resolution of the image needs to be lower than if it were a printed piece. This is necessary to keep the file size down, as it can easily exceed a few gigs. The printing process is different for trade show graphics than for printed pieces, and the process varies according to the type of material the graphic is printed on.

There are many unique structures to choose from for trade show graphics, such as pop-up banners, roll-up banners, hanging banners, and more. Options allow for easy portability and installation.

The only thing I wish for in this process, is that I could be at the show to experience the effect!

Using the computer as a common medium for printed design, website design, and video has resulted in each specialty influencing each other. Whatever our specialty, each of us has become somewhat of a multimediast.

For example, printed design sometimes looks more like website design through the organization of its content. Article outlines are often designed like website buttons.

Websites use callouts like in printed media, except they become buttons. Flipbooks (virtual books that can be flipped through, complete with page turning mpeg sounds) have become popular on websites.

Video is frequently used on websites in the form of a spokesperson.

Illustration construction and deconstruction (like Harold and the Purple Crayon) has become popular in video.

What does this mean? I like to think of it like multiculturism. Different media worlds getting to know each other, curious, and finding appreciation for what is unique and getting excited about what is similar. Ultimately, it’s a bigger playground!

We just launched a website with a “Google-ish” search function that appears prominently on every page of the website. It is like a Google search function in that it is simple and the prominent search area on the page.

This is an example of how DDA moves along with constantly advancing navigation trends. As people become more web-savvy we can move away from old-fashioned rules of designing web pages, and incorporate new navigation methods, both for their function and for aesthetic appeal.

For example, websites used to display bright blue underlined links, but now people are so familiar with links that we have more flexibility — we can make links bold, red, and with delicate dotted underlines, and it is still very clear they are links.

At DDA, it is a team effort to decide how to organize the menu links and what hierarchy to give them. We pay attention to where links are placed on web pages (especially the home page) so that visitors can easily find what they are looking for and so that they are more drawn to certain sections of the website.

In this way, a website home page is like a printed advertisement. Often special links are pulled out and made into attractive buttons, just like call-outs in a printed piece. The home page may have prominent taglines that quickly summarize what the company specializes in, reinforcing a clear message and giving the visitor quick information.

DDA’s clients can rely on us to be up-to-date on new navigation methods, and yet not too far ahead to exclude those who have older browsers and computers.

One thing I like about working at DDA is that I can do both design and illustration.These two disciplines don’t feel as separate as before, because in the last 15 years they have been brought together by the computer as one medium.

When Adobe Illustrator first became popular, illustrators had the option of using those electronic tools, or sticking to traditional media like pen and paper. There was a debate whether the quality of illustration would change, and many were skeptical that the computer could produce an illustration with the detail and richness in texture that can be achieved with more tactile materials.

Print Magazine decided to put the debate to a test; a group of very well know illustrators were asked to produce an illustration in their established style using the computer, to see if the result looked different, better, or worse. The result was that, uniformly, the illustrators themselves were surprised to find that they did not feel limited by using the computer.

I remember being suprised that each illustrator’s distinctive style was preserved, and that I liked their electronic illustrations as much as their traditional illustrations.

We still use pen, paper, and lightboxes when illustrating at DDA, along with the computer. I always loved having many tools available to create an illustration — colored pencils, ink, paint, and pencil. The computer is one of my favorite tools now, and it’s good to know that my illustration style is more influenced by me than by the tools that I use.

Just like fashion and architecture, design goes through trends. Technology plays a part in that. For example, when Photoshop first introduced the ability to create drop shadows and other more frivolous effects, including psychedelic twirls, some designers used those effects heavily.

Designers now tend to use those effects with more subtlety and, we like to think, sophistication. Font usage can also date a design. There are some beautiful fonts that, because of their uniqueness, speak of a certain era. I can see why trends keep coming back, because it is hard to resist using some of these fonts just because they remind us of an earlier time.

But sometimes it’s possible to break the rules. I just finished a technical sales sheet, and managed to get away with using an older font (Bauhaus) by using it mostly in the headers. It works because it is similar to the font used for the company’s logo.

I love it when it works to break the rules, and if we can do it often enough, maybe we’ll help bring back that font’s popularity!

Last week I enjoyed a wonderful vacation in Florida. On the drive down, we saw multiple billboard signs to visit “South of the Border,”a dinky tourist attraction/theme park on the North and South Carolina border, and an example of successful marketing by using persistent messages and images.

The theme is Mexican and playful. Black billboards with Western style typography and colorful sombrero hats stick out to the weary driver on the monotonous road, beckoning to stop by and visit this plastic, campy world, with jumbo cactuses, and cartoonish Mexican caricatures.

On arriving, we made a beeline for “Pedro’s Coffee Shop,” which boasted the largest sign in sight. Missing Starbucks, we were happy imagining even boiled coffee in a tin pot, but the trick was on us, because the store was really a hat store. They did have Maxwell house coffee, way in the back of the store, as a bonus for buying a hat!!

We discovered that each store we ventured into had a sign that did not match its contents! We started to wonder, for whose amusement was the park really for??

Hungry, we finally moved on, without checking out the restaurants there, half expecting them to sell leather shoes instead.

Several of us had childhood memories of the billboards but had not actually ever visited the park, so we did leave with this revisited mystery finally satisfied.