A designer by day.

I’ve decided to add this new section to the blog to spark more discussions about what we do as designers and how we affect the world. So read below and let’s chat!

1: Do we design for the people or for peers?

It’s true, whenever we get a new project, our first step is to look closer into the target market and dedicate ourselves into luring it.

But I always find myself wondering whether people are really affected by the visual aesthetics of what we do. Do our efforts really matter? When your target market is as specific as an age group, you know your energy is not wasted, because it’s clear that kids will respond to more colors and cartoons and exclamation marks! But when the service/product you’re designing serves a broader audience, can you be sure of how sensitive these people are to design?

This question is most present when I see a poorly designed product/service doing wonders numbers wise. The people didn’t care about the visual brand but rather about what it really offers. And that’s fine by me! That’s even, ethically speaking, quite the perfect thing to happen. But it saddens me because it makes me all the more aware that I stress for nothing.

And on the other hand, one has to admit, that through the course of creating a brand, we designers are not only concerned with building loyalty to the brand but most importantly concerned with how it will look in our portfolios and how it will measure up to the work of designer peers.

In the race between form and function, functionality is always a priority both to the designer and the client. Functionality serves the people without their knowing, magazines made more entertaining to read, health brochures made more easy to understand, paper work made less painful to fill out. But when it comes to the form, nothing is certain.

What makes it even harder is that once you’re a designer you can never claim to be in a non-designer’s shoes. Texts you read will always be about kerning and leading before meaning.

So designers, do you fall into the designing for peers issue too? Would you risk your portfolio over a client’s needs or would you rather risk the success of a brand over peer recognition?

And people, how sensitive do you think you are to design? When you’re standing in front of a supermarket shelf do you pick one product over the other because of the way it looks? Is visual experience a factor when you choose a restaurant?

I’m usually one to hate inspirational speeches, I mean what a load of crap! All words and no actions, all theories and no applications. But with the TEDTalks it’s different, having real people, from all walks of life, sharing their experiences is crapless inspiration. So I went yesterday to the TEDxBeirut 3rd salon and here are a couple of things that I've learned about myself and the world:

1 - The left hemisphere has a huge hold of my life. I’m all about the left hemisphere. I’m over conscious of myself and of the things around me in the wrong way. I should stop postponing those yoga lessons.

2 - Lately I’ve been telling myself that I’ve spent too much time curled up into my own bubble and that it’s probably time for me to open up and get out there. And it kinda felt like that was naturally happening for me. And coincidentally, in one of the TEDTalks, the guy talks about how ideas are more likely to be born when you’re in a group. I’ve never experienced that really. I always shut down in a brainstorming session and I almost always come up with ideas when I’m alone. Or maybe, thinking about it, all the research we do is a kind of fictional group.

3 - Connecting VS protecting. Now that is a struggle that fits me perfectly. I love sharing ideas but there’s a very motherly, protective voice inside that tells me I should protect them. After TEDTalks I have all the more reason to fight that voice. “Chance favors the connected mind.”

4 - All work and no play makes Nisrine a very boring, unproductive person. And that is a scientific fact.

5 - It’s OK that I haven’t been giving my blog the attention it deserves because I’ve been unknowingly fighting local warming!

So make sure to attend TEDxBeirut on September 24th at Berytech Technological Pole. I’m sure it’ll be an event to remember!

www.tedxbeirut.com
www.ted.com

My biggest concern when it comes to this blog is personalizing it. I know nothing about CSS and I try my best to work within the available blogger templates while still trying to maintain a minimalistic and clear design. One of the last dilemmas I faced while changing it is whether to use a serif or a sans serif for the body text. I was always under the impression that serif is more readable due to the serifs that guide the horizontal flow of the eyes. After all, there must be a good reason why all books we read are set in serifs. However, turns out for the screen it’s different.

I’ve found a great article that explains the pros and cons. The main argument that kind of does it for me is a technical one.

“When typefaces are digitized for use on computers, the letter forms have to fit within a relatively small pixel grid, often leading to what are called the “jaggies”. Many web professionals such as graphic designers claim that this relatively low resolution cannot render effectively enough the fine finishing strokes of serif typefaces, and that sans serif typefaces lend themselves more naturally to being digitized, and come out cleaner and thus more legible.”

Make sure to read the whole thing for a more extensive explanation. It’s really well researched and written with great references.

The concept of rebirth seems as old as birth itself. It’s as if Man fell so in love with life the minute he set eyes on the world that the idea of it having an end was unfathomable.

In ancient Egypt the scarab was a sign of eternal renewal and reemergence of life. The Ouroboros, the snake devouring its own tail, is an ancient symbol of eternal recurrence, representing cycles that begin anew as soon as they end.

But I believe the Phoenicians were the greatest visionaries of all. For them to have created the legend of the phoenix, they must’ve long predicted the fate of their own land, the fate of Lebanon, the embodiment itself of rebirth. And we love to prove our ancestors right. We love to watch it smolder to ashes and then fight our way up again. We even brag about it. But the eternal return of Lebanon, as heroic as it may be, isn’t as admirable as it sounds. We do rise after each fall but we lose parts of ourselves each time and we’re losing track of the essence of it all. We worry only about the “eternal” part and not about the “return”. We want to burn and be reborn again because we don’t know how else to do things. And we’ve sadly managed to turn the heroic into the horrific. But I digress.

I visited ‘Rebirth: Lebanon 21st Century Contemporary Art’ yesterday, an exhibition of works by 49 contemporary Lebanese artists, on the theme of rebirth and it got me thinking about the above amongst many other things. Nothing like art to provoke thought really.

Teachers, lecturers, peers, everybody who's anybody will tell you that the biggest, most important step in any design project is research. And this is largely, though not undeniably, true. Back in college, I wasn't quite the online research guru that I am now. The only 2 websites that I ever ran to for help were Google images and DeviantArt. And although, looking back, I realize that my visual eye was really immature, I still made it top of my class. I didn't need endless hours online, just my concept and the little visual culture I had growing in the back of my head. Things have drastically changed now. The magic word for any Google research now is "showcase", they're everywhere and they cover EVERYTHING!
So after going from little to too much visual research, I'm realizing that I should hit the brakes again. Why, you might ask? Here's the reasoning behind it: