Samantha Warren's Badass Ideas

Michael Aleo recently wrote a post that stirred up some feelings that I have about AIGA. That is that AIGA is an organization that claims to represent professional designers but doesn’t really accurately represent the current landscape of the design industry.

Michael’s post details an e-mail conversation he had with a judge from the DC AIGA50 design competition. For full disclosure I don’t know Michael (though I reached out to him with a few background questions on his post) and the fact that he was entered in the competition may lead some to consider his point of view to be biased. I did not enter the competition and I am not currently a paying member of AIGA but have been in the past. I have judged a competition for another organization and served on the board of the Art Directors Club of DC. I do not currently live in the DC area but work for an agency headquartered there. I am fully aware that his post may not represent every angle of the story. I invite other sides of this story to respond, and I would love it if someone from AIGA would comment and be more transparent about what lead to the comments made by this judge.
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As many can tell you, SXSW is what you make of it. I have attended some really great conferences in the last year but none have replaced the opportunities you have to connect with uber amazing people like SXSW. Not only does Austin provide a great campus for meeting new people, SXSW gives you the timeline to make something of those opportunities. Conversations I took part in ranged from design inspiration to web education to fostering creativity on a design team. I even got in some nerdy web typography talk with Yves Peters. It was sort of fantastic.

The conversations I had and panels I watched got me thinking about a lot. Some takeaways were personal and others were themes for our industry to embrace. This is what I left with:
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I like to blog about  design. The tricky thing about that is that it is hard to blog about design when you don’t feel great about the design of your blog. My “blog design complex” has been a big hurdle for me over the past year. It inhibits my blogging.

Blogging is a critical piece of the web design industry, sharing knowledge helps elevate the quality of work within our industry. I have learned a lot about design both by blogging and by reading other people’s blogs. The web community is in a bit of a lull, lately. We share information more frequently over twitter and dribble. And while I think both of those methods are great, they don’t replace the sharing of more in-depth ideas that require the longer format of a blog post.
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“Close your eyes and feel their presence; channel their emotions” is how my figure drawing instructor would kick off many mornings of our 3.5 hour long studio session. It took me several semesters of softly shading tummy pooches and abstracting rounded shoulders to learn that the most engaging depictions of the human form weren’t clear representations of what was in front of me, but deep abstractions of lines and light.

People all react to visual elements differently, as designers we try and create compositions that communicate the intended message to the widest audience of people, while also appeasing our clients. It’s our responsibility to balance the parameters and opinions of  our clients with the overall communication goals of a design. While there are lots of tactics for doing this I am convinced that understanding the psychology of visual perception (the “why”s) carve a faster path to quality end results more-so than the “hows”.
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Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. Aesthetics and economics, technology and psychology are intrinsically related to the process.”

- Paul Rand Graphis, 1981

Happy Cog posted a link to the most fantastic document; a compilation of Paul Rand quotes assembled by Steven Heller. There are so many nuggets of wisdom, go download it at once!

I have been very fortunate to find and get involved with the web design community since attending SXSW in 2006, but more recently I have been meeting a lot of wonderful folks in the Drupal community. In 2009 I started working at Phase2 Technology, an Alexandria Virginia web agency that specializes in open source development and is known for working with Drupal. Phase2 is passionate about the community; being involved and giving back is an integral part of our daily work lives. Community involvement is something I value a lot, so working with a group of people who honestly share that vision is a real treat. The Drupal community has greeted me with open arms and I am starting to understand the challenges they have when promoting visual design amongst those looking to use the platform.

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