AIGA: Sean Adams

Sean Adams:

• ”risk it, no biscuit” if you don't take risk you don’t get anything back.

• His work has to connect at an emotional level.

• After working for the NY Public Library, he moved to LA and worked for a design company for some years. He realized that he could be designing things better than the work he was seeing out there, so he started his own company with a partner. It was called Adams & Morioka. Their work motto was clear simple, clean work.

• When he was picking which client to work with he would choose two from the 3 categories he personally had, which were Fun, Fame and Fortune. Fun meaning it’s going to be a fun and challenging  project, Fame meaning it’s worthy of being used in your portfolio and Fortune is obviously if its going to make you some quality money.

• He created a book called: The Sociological Study on Graphic Design. The content of the book was totally made up. He just took information from different studies and plugged it in and made, it was meant to be a joke but people read it and believed it was real. This shows that designers don’t really read they just look to see how well put together things are.

• Sean stated that his first step of any project he does is research.

• He quoted “ You need to be in it, to win it.” which he then said you need to be part of the community, do a lot of pro bono work.

• While he was out in Berlin for a work study program with his students, he come to realize what happiness felt like, and learned that you should do what you love.

• After 20 years of working with his company he left the firm and focused more on educating.

• He said you need to embrace the weird. To get rid of the fear of criticism.

• Whatever it is that makes you weird, makes you the best designer.

• He left us with this “ Your work is the most important..You have to work on projects that will help your portfolio because you can’t use the portfolio you had two years ago, so keep working. Do more projects!

Text Texture

Teaching to see: Inge Druckrey

      Inge teaches her students to see in a abstract manner, not to see an object but to see round, square,texture or smooth and translate it into a form language. If you don't train the eye to see you can't come up with ideas if you don't "see" first. Limiting yourself helps you have a clear playground and helps you focus. You can make a negative area come to life with very little. Graphic design is seeing and envisioning; the eye has to move around enjoyable without getting stuck. It has to flow  and work together with no unnecessary things getting in your way. She believed a that control of negative space is important. 

    She mentioned that letters are motion, a memory of motion form. The elements she said to creating typeface are: share a common structure, sufficiently distinct from each other ensure readability and lastly it has to have proper optical letter spacing to assure even rhythm and color. Inge also talked about information design and what elements a good map should have and how well it conveys the information clearly where as a bad map is cluttered and hard to understand. She spoke about the usage of hue, color, gray value and brightness to help define different information on a map because our eye is sensitive to distinguishing variation of color. 

   Inge stated the meaning of graphic design is visualizing an idea, drawing attention, informing, distance reading, symbolizing something and getting the essence of something.

Texture

Scale

Summary/ Review

" A New Approach to Design Thinking." -Doug Powell 

  This presentation was about IBM's new site that is their new approach to design thinking. Instead of working with 5-10 people, you can now work with 500 people from different parts of the world. This allows you to get feedback from so many different people with different views and opinions. IBM Design Thinking site's main focus is Human centered outcomes at speed and scale. They focus on user outcome, multi-disciplinary teams and restless reinvention (iterate, iterate, iterate.) The keys to their design thinking is HILLS: which is a statement of intent that frames a problem of the predicted outcome. PLAYBACKS: allows project stake holders to share and get feedback and stay in the loop on a private platform.
SPONSORED USERS: Real people who will use the product in the future will become active participants in the process to help deliver true meaningful outcomes. 


"Creative Inspiration Workspace" - Margo Chase
    
  Margo has big posters of logo work that she has done since the beginning of her career. She believes the mood of the space should reflect the work they do. The work they do is unusual/ eclectic but functional. Her space reflects that meaning it's not too fancy but functional. The walls in the office is covered with a fun mural of the their interpretation of the outside of their office. The studio is a open space so people could talk and work at the same time, share ideas, contribute to each others project, give criticism and just collaborate with each other. Her team members are very flexible, she has an account person working with a creative but they don't always work with the same person , it may change depending on the situation. She has a large library because she believes that its very important part of the process.

Rhythm & Balance

POINTS, LINES, PLANES

Sean Kelley Lecture

• ALWAYS SPELL CHECK! 
• have a supply of pencils.
• Carry a sketch book and always write in it whether it's your grocery list, ideas or sketches of anything. Just keep writing.
• He has "pillars" that he ask his clients when they first meet. These are the questions that determines what direction he needs to go when creating his work.
• Have a group of people you trust, that will give you honest criticism. 

Circles, Squares, Triangles

100 ITERATIONS : FACES