HOW GOOD IS GOOD
In the book “ Design for the real world “ Victor Papanek said “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier: Advertising design. In persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others that don’t care, it is probably the phoniest field in existence today “
There are a many answer to the question: ”what makes a good design”. I think that one of the most important factors to make a good design is our purposes when we design something
As we know, there are many purpose when we design something. It is perceive as a good design when we try to make the world better throughout our designs. This is the design with good cause.
Most of current graphic design done by professional design companies is used to promote or sell, which is fine, but design can also do so much more.
Design can raise money. The Breast Cancer symbol contributes a great deal to the promotions and ads that raised money for Non-Profit organizations.
Design can make people feels better. Design simple things for our life such as designing a birthday card for our beloved mom also makes her happy. Design can be very simple but meaningful.
According to philosopher Edward De Bono, there are four equally important sections that we must balance :
Me-values : ego and pleasure
Mates-values: belonging to a group, not letting it down
Moral-values: religious values, general law, general values of a particular culture
Mankind-values: human rights, ecology
It is difficult to balance all these four important sections. If we can balance these four sections in our design then I’m sure that this design is good (of course this design must be aesthetic ^^`)
In summary :
Good design + bad cause = bad
Bad design + good cause = good
Good Design + Good Cause = Good
Reference:
Book cover
This is the book cover I designed for my book cover assignment. This is the cover page of a book of Victor Papanek, title " Design for the real world". In this book, he stated that one of the phoniest professions in the world is advertising design. Advertising design trends to persuade people to buy things they don't need.
In this cover page, I took the picture myself. The scene is near my house. After reading the summary of this book, I think that this book will relate to the development of society and advertising. I try to find the picture that demonstrate the development of society and also have advertisement. I also play with white space in my cover page. I try to arrange the text and image in a way that readers can easily read them. My design is quite plain and simple. My main colour for this design is black and white. Although it is quite plain, I believe that this book cover be able to demonstrate the main idea of this book and this book cover page can also attract viewers.
Synesthesia
In the presentation of my friends in class, they mention about Synesthesia. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which two or more senses are coupled. People who have synesthesia are always much more sensitive than other odinary people. Many people with synesthesia use their experiences to create artworks.The phrase synesthesia in art has historically refered to a wide variety of artistic experiments in order to synthesize different arts such as visual music, abstract film, computer animation, symbolist poetry, multimedia and intermedial art.
If you have synesthesia, you will live in a world where the sound of music would make you see colours, where the alphabets also have colours.Where the world all have its own colors and meaning.
In the website of abcnews, let’s see those who live in synesthesia world told us about this:
“My voice, for example, is not only something that you hear but also something that you might see or taste or feel as a physical touch," Cytowic said.
Rosser sees every note of the piano she plays as a distinct color. "E flat is turquoise. Very warm turquoise," Rosser said. "F sharp is yellow-green." When Rosser plays many notes together, she said the colors "sort of merge into each other."
Cytowic said people with synesthesia have a "different texture of reality."
There are many experiment or test if you are synthesis or not. Such as can you see each letter has its own color or not …
