Function is Beauty.

It just is.

Flush.

Something “Comic”-al about Voting

Upon being told by my friend that we (American citizens) actually vote in the primaries and not some representatives (I’m a little rusty on my government knowledge, I know; sorry, Mr. Gray), I was obligated to register to vote. So I did the online registration thing and had to wait for them to send me the form to sign before sending it back to complete the registration.

Today I received the form, and I was going to just sign it and drop it in the mail as soon as possible because the office has to receive the registrations at least 15 days before the election (Feb. 5 in California). But when I opened my form and saw the computer-printed text, I knew I had to blog about it before mailing it.

Why, oh why did they use Comic Sans? When I see that on government forms like this, I think of volunteer old ladies sitting in front of outdated 90’s computers at the elections office or whatever, choosing a “cute” font thinking that boring-looking forms like this would look “prettier” and “more fun” and might actually encourage soon-to-be voters to drop it in the mail sooner than they would.

And the thing is, that probably is true and does work on most voters.

But I don’t understand. Aside from it being Comic Sans, the text doesn’t even fit in the squares, nor does it align with them! (Notice the bubble for “Mr.”) The only explanation I can think of (aside from pissing off graphic designers) is that they need something that is large, not normal-looking, and curved where they probably shouldn’t be, to jump out of the squares to make sure that you notice what you entered on the form online was correct. If that’s their reason, then it’s effective—sort of. “Sort of” because while the text did get my attention, it felt like such a sin to look at, and I almost didn’t want to double-check the form before mailing it in.

Maybe that’s why old people vote more and youngsters like me don’t.

Flush.

P.S. No offense to volunteer old ladies; it’s not your fault Comic Sans was created.

Redos for Portfolio

So while I’m busy getting my portfolio and site together and not having much time researching for Flush entries, I might as well keep you all (all four or five of you, haha) updated on my progress.

For the past two or three weeks, I’ve been “redoing” pieces that I’m considering to put in my portfolio. I guess “redo” is not the right word, since I’m not completely doing these pieces from scratch; I’m actually doing a combination of refining and reworking, where I fix anything that I wanted to fix after the projects were due and the critiques were made but didn’t feel like looking at them anymore after they were done.

While reworking on these pieces, I realize that I definitely improved in terms of skills and knowledge about design over time, specifically from junior year to senior year. I don’t know if I would’ve had better pieces if I took the “junior year” classes later in college, but I feel that with my “senior year” pieces, I knew a lot more of what I was doing. Maybe that’s just growth which is inevitable at any stage.

So here are three examples of things that I “reworked,” from teeny tiny details to relatively medium details.

Form Poster

This was from my DES 155A (Form, Pattern, Surface) class, which I sometimes like to refer to as the personal exploratory class. I had to work with the word “pest” for the entire quarter, and this was my piece on the exploration in form.

Before: Just Univers tracing laid right on top of photograph with no editing. After: tracings reworked to include “frayed strands” to complement the photograph per the instructor’s suggestion.

The All-Nighter

This was from my DES 157 (Flash) class, and our first Flash project was to create an opening motion graphic sequence for a fictional movie about some aspect of our lives. I did it about me spending all-nighters working on design projects. This is actually my second rework because the instructor allows us to rework it for a better grade.

Before: The taskbar has somewhat flat shapes that didn’t really look like the real taskbar. Gradients and such were hard to deal with in pre-CS3 Flash. It still kinda is, but I know more Flash now. After: Dimensionality is added to look more like the real deal. You can see the old version on TP107.

Aerospace Museum of California Site Redesign

This was from my DES 153 (HTML/CSS) class, and we had to redesign an existing site. I really like this piece because it’s so clean-looking yet also functional. And as always, table-less layout with CSS, although my CSS back then was somewhat confusing and elaborate. It took me some time to figure out what I did.

Before: The sub-navigation color scheme is different from the main navigation and seems kinda confusing if you don’t know where you are (See TP107 for old version). After: Expanded the highlighted main nav tab one pixel so it connects with the sub-navigation, which makes the relationship between the two immediately stronger.

So last night I was pretty much done with all the redos that I’m going to do for this portfolio season. I had two or three more that I wanted to rework, but they’re going to take a lot more time and aren’t that worth putting into the portfolio.

So the next stage is to get my identity and such materials ready before I get to putting my portfolio pieces together with cohesiveness in design. I did a preliminary schedule a few days ago and it seems that I probably won’t be completely ready to look for a job until the end of January, because I want to get the portfolio, the portfolio site, and my general web site up so employers can have something to look at instead of an “under construction” page.

Flush.