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Identification
Figure 2.8 A day in the life of a designer. Note how a number of “little things” build up to take a large portion of the day. Another factor is the breaking up of the day. Long coherent spaces are rare.
Amendment to the Tailor’s Principle: Plan for Lag Time No matter how focused you are, unless you have a place to hide with your work, there will be interruptions. Life and its attending chaos intrude into the most carefully laid-out plans. Plan for interruptions and delays, such as unexpected phone calls, meetings not ending promptly on schedule, distractions of all kinds, and so on. Planning time to exclusively work is fine, but realize that you need to be creative—not just busy—and, as you saw in the Inspiration chapter, you must have time to refuel (Figure 2.8). Factor “couch time” into your planning to keep yourself sane in the long run. Devote extra hours in your day to be divided between extra assembly time and life’s chaos. By adding, say, two hours to each day, you may avoid adding twelve hours to a project’s final day. Without this math, you may very well be in danger of showing up at your presentation without having slept and with unfinished or hurried-looking work. Time constraints are frustrating. We never feel there is enough time, and we usually feel that having a little more time will make things so much better. However, it is good to remember that the best you can do in a given timeframe is always the best you can do, whether it’s the best you can do in three days or three years. Materials Materials must conform to both inherent and imposed constraints. If designing for the physical world, you need to learn about materials, what they are, and how they behave. The capabilities of the materials you choose will direct your project throughout. From the time you begin planning and sketching, through preparing for production, to the eventual cost of shipping, the materials you choose will be a factor in your work and decision-making. If it is not immediately clear what materials are going to be involved in your project, consider both form and function and how each will be influenced by material choices. Strength, comfort, weight, and aesthetics should be considered, as well as production issues of standards, price, and availability. There may be color choices involved, and often materials can carry an emotional, psychological, or political message, such as in environmentally friendly design (Figure 2.9).
Figure 2.9 Learn about materials. Engage with them hands-on, so that you know what they do and how they behave. The constraints of the materials are in the end the largest determining factor of the production and experience of your design.
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Conceptualization
Process into Practice Stage 3: Conceptualization Study the concept maps below to see how each of the categories produces different results within in a very similar structure. Think about what you might add to these concept maps and how they might change based on apparel, furniture, or GUIs that you see in your own environment.
Apparel: Conceptualization
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Elements and Principles of Design
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Hue When we speak of hue, we are basically identifying the color itself as it would appear on a classical color wheel (i.e., red, blue, yellow-green). In discussing color, this is the least amount of information we can give. In the absence of a color swatch, this is too loose a definition and requires more information for your audience to understand precisely for what you are aiming. You may say “blue,” but even in your environment right now (look around!) there may be any number of items, each sporting a variation on “blue.” More definition is needed. Value Value may be the first stop in further defining a color beyond its hue. This is the relative lightness or darkness of a color. On a gray scale, the lightest value is white, and the darkest is black. The terms tint, tone, and shade are also used in this context when dealing with paint, where a tint refers to white being added to the color, a tone is when gray is added, and a shade is when black is added. Designing with color schemes based on varying values of colors creates a harmonious whole that the hue ties together, while the different values create variety.
Figure A.2 The value of a color is best understood as its position relative to a gray-scale. It is the light-to-dark scale of the color.
Intensity The intensity of a color refers to its saturation and is traditionally used in terms of paint, although lighting designers will also refer to saturation for the amount of color generated by gels. Paint is made of binder and pigment, and saturation refers to how much pigment is in the solution. Paints straight out of a tube are highly saturated, and liquid paints are less so. Highly saturated colors in design tend to create an intense effect, while less saturation can produce an effect of calm.
Figure A.3 Saturation is simply the amount of color that is present. Think of the amount of pigment in paint, for example.
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