EmilyW.R02

Layering and Separation are two very crucial elements of any design. This article was interesting but not as informative as I hoped it would be. The two things that I feel I got from this reading were pay attention to your negative space and the Joseph Albers rule 1+1=3 (these two principles are very closely related so I may go as far as to say I got one thing out of this article). There was maybe a very brief touch on how color effects a design. Over all I do feel disappointed with what I read. Layering and separation is a HUGE realm in design and I feel like the article only lightly touched the surface. I don't like to give critique without a reason to back it up and I understand why this might be confusing to the reader. However, I'm still new at this too and I don't have the adequate information to back up my opinion, maybe it is suffice to say I didn't learn enough from this article to articulate why.

I did appreciate some "touchingly ramshackle" humor in this article like "if the paper is heavily gridded on both sides, throw it out" and "some 460 lamp-whiskers were erased". Also I knew that, for example, if a border is too wide and then placed close to another border it looks bad and makes your eyes spin but I didn't have words to describe it. After reading this article I know about 1+1=3. I read about Joseph Albers before and this equation as it applies to color theory but now I can connect it beyond that with shape, line, and rhythm.

The video of David McCandless was very informative and inspiring. His data maps were extremely well done and interesting to look at. In addition his Ideas about information design made me get excited about this class and even imagine if I had a job designing data maps what kinds of information design I could do. These are the kinds of things I want to take away from this class. How to create successful designs for our modern era and cater to the needs of our information overloaded population. I want to make people drink from my designs and I want them to let me pour it down their throats.