short years ago, when I was hired as a graphic artist at a small-to-medium-sized newspaper in southern California, there was talk of a revolution taking place in the world’s media companies — a revolution driven by rapid changes in technology. The advent of the desktop computer meant that the products produced by these companies had a new and different focus on graphic design — and its possibilities. And this, it was felt, would forever change the industry. Suddenly, presentation skills were in great demand, and creative people flocked to news companies to fill newly created or expanded newsroom roles: designers, graphics specialists, art directors.
This “revolution,” of course, was merely the beginning of something much larger: seismic, unimaginable shifts in technology, in the everyday habits of people and, slowly and somewhat reluctantly, the complete transformation of media companies themselves. Revolution is usually painful: just ask any editor at any city newspaper. But it also brings opportunity. And in spite of the upheavals that continue to shape so many aspects of the communications industry today, the opportunity for designers to thrive in the modern media landscape has never been greater.
The ongoing revolution represents a shift from one to several specializations. The demand for high-quality graphic design in newspapers, magazines, online and beyond has grown and will continue to grow. And companies now actively seek employees that possess a wide range of skills and talents — especially the ability to think, create and communicate in a visual way.
Course objectives
Successfully completing J365 means:
- You will achieve a solid understanding of the principles of visual design — using space, creating visual flow and developing an active awareness of spatial relationships within your work.
- You will learn to create strong visual focus to achieve maximum impact, choose typography that speaks to the reader and use color to effectively convey your message.
- You will learn to present stories in innovative ways that attract readers. You will learn how to be loud and obnoxious, and you will learn to be quiet and restrained. (In your designs, that is.)
Along the way, you will learn to create print layouts in Adobe InDesign, illustrations and information graphics in Illustrator and Photoshop, and employ HTML and CSS to build compelling Web pages. Perhaps you already have vast experience in such applications; perhaps all are completely new to you. The first doesn’t guarantee your success, and the second in no way inhibits your possibilities. We will seek a pace that will benefit everyone in the class, and because every class is different, I ask for your help in determining what that pace is.
Learning any skill, from playing an instrument to speaking a language, requires practice. Sometimes a lot of practice. To truly incorporate a skill means you must practice it to the point that it can be performed without your thinking about it. Mastering computer skills in this way removes the barrier of your being concerned with making a program behave the way you want it to, and you can devote your full intellectual capacity to creativity. As a designer in any medium, this is your ultimate goal. Unfortunately, fifteen weeks is not long enough to quite get there, but we will take purposeful strides in that direction. And I trust your learning will continue beyond this class.
A brief word of caution, however, about these magnificent machines: learning computer skills is not the primary goal of this course. Virtually nothing I learned in 1988 about how to use Micrografx Designer is of any use to me today, at least from a technical standpoint. What I learned at that time about how to think and communicate in a visual way, however, remains vitally important. While we will spend a good deal of our time learning how to use computers and software to execute our vision, it is learning and using the principles of design — composition, typography, color, etc. — that you will ultimately find most valuable, along with learning how to learn new applications, which you will likely be doing for the rest of your career.