Learning to Become a Better Designer and Setting Guidelines for Myself
My goal after BDW is to become a visual designer. Setting guidelines for each design project I do is important, but setting guidelines for myself as a designer in general will allow me to constantly get better and produce strong work.
Form and function working as one
Form follows function is a 20th century modernist architecture and industrial design principal stating the shape of a building or object should be based on its intended purpose. In graphic design form and function should work together simultaneously to create the best visually appealing user experience. Form in any design piece includes colors, shapes, negative space, sizing, and typography. The function of a design piece is the functionality of what the designer is creating. This could be a simple navigation bar on a website or the complete branding for a company or individual. The functionality should never be hindered by the form or vice versa. The form and function work together to create a visually appealing and well functioning design piece.
A designer wants a user to look at a design and find it visually pleasing. The viewer may not know why something is appealing, but they will notice whether or not the design is cohesive. The viewer will quickly notice if something sticks out or does not match the rest of the design work. This means the form will impact the functionality of whatever the designer has created. This is something we have spent time learning in our design thinking class. If I am setting out to design two different design ideas for one project, I need to set my guidelines for each first. One of our latest projects was to design a questionnaire. Before I started I decided that one of my designs would be cleaner with harder lines while my other would use lots more color and would have softer lines. While working on these, I let myself slightly forget my guidelines and this led to my designs being less strong than they could have been. In this case my lack of form guidelines impacted the functionality of the questionnaire.
When working on a project I still find it hard to keep to the guidelines I have set up for myself in the beginning. To become a better designer I need to stay true to any guidelines I have previously set up so that the outcome of my design is exactly what it should be. Maintaining these guidelines will allow my form or visual aesthetics to work well with whatever the functionality of what I am designing may be.
