Ten Things

Ten Things I have learned while doing the module Critical Debates in Debates are: 1- I have learned how to create a blog. 2- I have learned how to embed YouTube videos. 3- I have learned a little bit of Html. 4- I have learned that it is a must for designers to work ethically. 5- I have learned that it is a must for designers to design sustainably due to the sever planet pollution. 6- I have learned that companies have Social Responsibilities that I wasn’t aware of before. 7- I was exposed to different kind of movie, which I got to know famous Architects, designers, product designers, interior designers, and moviemakers that I wasn’t aware of before. 8- I have learned that it is worth investigating in every visual, advert and movie that I will see. 9- I have learned that I should use a several ways of research and investigations, in order to defend my idea. 10- I have learned a lot of things actually!
Hope this was entertaining enough! ☺

Task 8

Sustainable design_

As Graphic designer, my own aim nowadays is involving sustainable design in delivering the best performance.
Sustainable design involves the strategic use of design to meet current and future human needs without compromising the environment. It includes redesign of products, processes, services or systems to tackle imbalances or trade-offs between the demands of society, the environment and the economy and, ultimately, restoration of damage already done.
Each one of us should be aware of the consequences of his behavior and acts towards the environment.

Task 7

Advertising!

Advertising, like it or not, is everywhere. It is on buses, billboards and hot-air balloons. It invades our living rooms, our classrooms and almost every aspect of human life.

It plays a crucial role in creating the image of a brand since it is a direct communication outlet.

Through advertising, the brand generates its structure as well as content, and builds up consumer behavior that result in the purchase of that particular brand.
Advertising is the key to the maintenance of the brand image. For effective ans successful branding and widespread knowledge and acceptance, repeating the brand image is necessary. This might be considered as one of the reasons of the trend of creating ad series.



It’s no secret that advertisements are supposed to persuade you to buy a product. That’s their job. Advertising may attempt to educate you or entertain you, but beneath it all, the ultimate goal is always to sell you.
The question is: are these strategies ethical? Do companies have an obligation to tell the truth or does the goal of selling the product override such ethical concerns?

Advertisers must create a scenario that heightens the consumer’s emotional state. No matter what strategy they use, they are always building a fantasy – one in which the consumer’s life is better because of the product.

Ethical questions abound when considering modern advertising techniques:

1- What responsibility, if any, does a company have for honestly educating the consumer about its product?

2- Should advertisers be allowed to suggest that a product will make a person more sexy/interesting/beautiful/successful/etc?

3- Is it ethical to use celebrities to sell products they probably don’t even use themselves?

4- Is it the buyer’s responsibility to be aware of these strategies and not allow them to manipulate their emotions?

Here are Cool Ads!

"First Things First"

From Wikipedia:

The First Things First 2000 manifesto, written and launched by Adbusters magazine in 1999, was an updated version of the earlier First Things First manifesto written and published in 1964 by Ken Garland, a British designer.

The 2000 manifesto was signed by a group of 33 figures from the international graphic design community, many of them well known, and simultaneously published in Adbusters (Canada), Emigre (Issue 51) [1] and AIGA Journal of Graphic Design (United States), Eye magazine no. 33 vol. 8, Autumn 1999 and Blueprint (Britain) and Items (Netherlands). The manifesto was subsequently published in many other magazines and books around the world, sometimes in translation. Its aim was to generate discussion about the graphic design profession's priorities in the design press and at design schools. Some designers welcomed this attempt to reopen the debate, while others rejected the manifesto.

The question of value-free design has been continually contested in the graphic design community between those who are concerned about the need for values in design and those who believe it should be value-free.^{[citation needed]} Those who believe that design can be free from values reject the idea that graphic designers should concern themselves with underlying political questions. Those who are concerned about values believe that designers should be critical and take a stand in their choice of work, for instance by not promoting industries and products perceived to be harmful. Examples of projects that might be classified as unacceptable include many forms of advertising and designs for cigarette manufacturers, arms companies and so on. Adbusters has been a significant outlet for these ideas, especially in its commitment to detournement and culture jamming.^{[citation needed]}

>>

We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.

Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession's time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best.

Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.

There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programs, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help.

We propose a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication - a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.

In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.

signed:

Jonathan Barnbrook
Nick Bell
Andrew Blauvelt
Hans Bockting
Irma Boom
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Max Bruinsma
Siân Cook
Linda van Deursen
Chris Dixon
William Drenttel
Gert Dumbar
Simon Esterson
Vince Frost
Ken Garland
Milton Glaser
Jessica Helfand
Steven Heller
Andrew Howard
Tibor Kalman
Jeffery Keedy
Zuzana Licko
Ellen Lupton
Katherine McCoy
Armand Mevis
J. Abbott Miller
Rick Poynor
Lucienne Roberts
Erik Spiekermann
Jan van Toorn
Teal Triggs
Rudy VanderLans
Bob Wilkinson

and many more

original Manifesto, 1964

Task 6

productPACKAGING

Packaging is story telling in a compressed area - like posters in miniature. Packs must mark out and differentiate the product from competitors, which they attempt in the most demanding of circumstances, often sitting next to direct competitors, on shelves brimming with distractions.

Packaging is so abundant in the solid waste system because it impacts so many aspects of life, commercially as well as privately. In fact, modern society could not exist without a mature and advanced packaging system, and packaging coincides with society's wants and needs. We choose what packaging is used by what we purchase.

The package designs are planned to reflect the many changing social and economic trends in the world. Several of those trends and resulting examples include:
health consciousness (nutrient and additive contents)
family size/singles (different portions)
economy (various sizes, quality levels)
mobility (convenience items)
novelty (over 150 new food and drug items are introduced every month in the U.S.)
labeling requirements (contents and directions)
available equipment (products for the freezer or microwave)
time and convenience to purchase and use (various available sizes, complete meals in a package)
consumerism (consumer complaints have the highest influence on pharmaceutical and health-related products)
customs and social habits (beverage packaging)
environmental concerns (reduced, reusable, recyclable packaging and recovery as energy)


Although packaging seems to be so prevalent, most packages serve at least one purpose and can be categorized as to type.

Three Types of Packaging
There are three types of packaging, depending on use. The container that directly holds the product is

the primary package. That may be a can, bottle, jar, tube, carton, drum, etc.
Any outer wrappings that help to store, transport, inform, display and protect the product are

secondary packaging. The decorated carton or gift box are common examples.
Lastly, tertiary packaging is used to group products for storage and transportation. The corrugated, brown carton is the most familiar. Large pallets of shrink-wrapped boxes are a common warehouse
sight reflecting tertiary packaging.

For any product, from one to all three types of packaging may be necessary depending on the intended purpose.

Five Purposes of Packaging
Each package for any product basically serves up
to five of the following purposes:
CONTAIN -- To hold the product directly; this is PRIMARY packaging.
INFORM -- To identify the brand and any related companies, to explain how it should be used, to warn about the hazards for misuse, and to reveal product contents.
PROTECT -- To prevent spoilage, leakage, breakage, moisture changes, theft and tampering.
TRANSPORT -- To easily and safely move the product from the manufacturer, perhaps to a
warehouse, then to the retailer and finally, to the consumer.
DISPLAY -- To attractively display, to sell (a marketing tool).

Task 5

Wendy E. Brawer -
Since 1990, Wendy's New York-based company, Modern World Design, has consulted and created services and products that promote ecological stewardship, including the Green Apple Map of NYC's environmentally significant places.

http://www.greenapplemap.org/

Under Wendy's direction, this project has grown into the Green Map System, an award-winning local-global collaboration now active in over 45 countries. With a globally designed visual language of Icons and programs for both city-wide and youth mapmakers, in 2000, Green Map System was spun off as a not-for-profit organization that Wendy continues to direct. This website also introduces her other communications, consulting and art projects.

Wendy has written about, shared information/ inspiration and taught about eco-design for more than a decade. Most currently she contributes to the Worldchanging NY blog, as well as continual writing about and for the Green Map System's global and local projects.

Wendy is on the BALLE Advisory Council and the International New Mobility Advisory Council. She is an active member of the O2 Global Network and co-founder and board member of O2NYC.

She chaired the Industrial Designers Society of America's Committee on Environmental Concerns in 1993-95, and was on ADPSR's NY board 1996-1999. Her design resume has more details, too.

Wendy was honored to be the Designer in Residence at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution in 1997.

In 2007, a video interview was created by Cornell University, and in 2005, Wendy was awarded a Woman of Earth - Terre de Femmes by Yves Rocher Foundation.

In 2003, she recieved a Sea Change Fellowship from Gaea Foundation.

In 2001, she was selected as one of I.D. Magazine's Top Forty socially responsible designers, and Metropolitan Home named her a Top 100 Designer in 2001. Shift Magazine called her an Eco-Innovator in 2002, too.

Wendy also received 1998's ECO Kudos Award for Connections (Communications Arts) and was co-winner of SolarScape, Art & Science Collaboration's 1999 competition.

Green Map honors include:

• 2007 US EPA Environmental Quality Award
  
  
• 2005 Selected for NGO Global Village Exhibit at Aichi EXPO 2005, Japan (seen by 400,000 people, and described here)
  
  
• 2002 Olympics' Spirit of the Land Award
  
  
• 2001 Technology Benefiting Humanities Awards Laureate
  
  
• 2001 Municipal Art Society's
  Certificate of Merit for our NYC projects
  
  
• EXPO 2000 Project Around the World
  
  
• 1999 US National Award for Sustainability in New Communication Tools, President's Council on Sustainable Development & Renew America
  
  
• 1998 United Nations Centre for Human Settlements' Global Best Practices 100 List

Cut out RAINYday!

Design Project B

This is my design project B link,
please check it out!
http://rela-k-projectb.blogspot.com/

Task 4

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), also called corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, responsible business and corporate social opportunity is where organizations consider the interests of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, communities and other stakeholders, and the environment.
This obligation extends beyond the statutory obligation to comply with legislation and sees organizations voluntarily taking further steps to improve the quality of life for employees and their families as well as for the local community and society at large.

A number of companies out there think that a good CSR program consists only of a soapbox and a bullhorn.

The World’s Most Ethical Companies are the ones that go above and beyond legal minimums; bring about innovative new ideas to expand the public well being.

Of course, no business is perfect. Every large corporation gets sued or experiences a crisis. The World’s Most Ethical Companies are the businesses that respond not with a PR campaign, but with real action, such as complete transparency for the public and significant effort given to fixing the core problem.

With over 100 years of business under its belt, UPS has become the world’s largest package delivery company, operating in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Mark Burns, the global compliance & ethics coordinator at UPS points out that UPS is “a global company with many different cultures. Although languages and cultures around the world may be different, we do not change our ethical standards at UPS.” To keep up with the worldwide operations, his ethics program must be ready for international demands. “Our ethics program is global in nature,” he says. “We provide ethics and code of conduct materials in 12 languages, ensuring that our employees understand and adopt ethics policies. Our culture also reinforces written policies. Managers are expected to be role models with their subordinates and their performance and career is judged accordingly.”


As for me I think that happiness at work leads to success!
Definitely having a good work ethic can take you a long way in your career, and can help you build a good reputation that carries you far.


References :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibility
http://ethisphere.com/wme2008/
http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Good-Work-Ethic:-What-Is-It?&id=115541

Task 3

The history of film spans over a hundred years, from the latter part of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century. Motion pictures developed gradually from a carnival novelty or a japanese pornography television show to one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment, and mass media in the 20th century. Motion picture films have had a substantial impact on the arts, technology, and politics.

Flip book were early popular animation devices invented during the 1800s, while a Chinese zoetrope-type device was invented already in 180 AD. These devices produced movement from sequential drawings using technological means, but animation did not really develop much further until the advent of cinematography.

There is no single person who can be considered the "creator" of the art of film animation, as there were several people doing several projects which could be considered various types of animation all around the same time.

Georges Méliès was a creator of special-effect films; he was generally one of the first people to use animation with his technique. He discovered a technique by accident which was to stop the camera rolling to change something in the scene, and then continue rolling the film. This idea was later known as stop-motion animation. Méliès discovered this technique accidentally when his camera broke down while shooting a bus driving by. When he had fixed the camera, a hearse happened to be passing by just as Méliès restarted rolling the film, his end result was that he had managed to make a bus transform into a hearse. This was just one of the great contributors to animation in the early years.

Romain Segaud was born in 1980. After earning a Bachelor of Science degree, he attended the famous Supinfocom school in Valenciennes in northern France . After four years, he codirected his first film, Tim Tom, with Christel Pougeoise. His inspiration for the film came from Georges Méliès, Svankmayer, Norman McLaren, and many others. Currently, Romain works with the French design company, Cube Creative.

http://www.romainsegaud.com/preload.html

Task 2

All organizations, buildings and streets need identity and wayfinding.
They need well designed wayfinding tools and sign systems to show us where we are, and where we are going.
If these systems are not in place, then buildings and environments cannot be navigated, nor used easily.


Street names:

Task 1

Type is one of the designers main considerations. Every designer is expected to choose the proper type from an enormous range of typefaces. The visual appearance of typefaces depends on a large extent on the relative measurements of their proportions.
The typeface that I am interested in are:

1Bembo
«Some typeface have stood the test of time and appear as contemporary today as they did 500 years ago. Their modern digitized version have a slight edge when it comes to clean outlines.» from the book Stop Stealing sheep» Erik Speikermann & E.M.Ginger.

Type designed by Francesco Griffo for Aldus Manutius'press. Bembo from the Monotype Corporation, 1929, is a modern equivalent.

1Helvetica
To compare typefaces characteristics, we should look closely at:
the stroke variation (contrast), serifs (if any), x-heights and the stress.
And we can clearly see that this typeface is based on geometrical shapes, and we can see also the wide empty space inside the body stroke (counter) which makes the font more legible, clear, straight forward and neutral.

1Avant Garde Gothic

ITC Avant Garde Gothic was designed by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase and based on Lubalin’s logo for Avant Garde magazine. Ed Benguiat designed the condensed fonts for the International Typeface Corporation. ITC Avant Garde Gothic is a geometric sans serif type, that is, the basic shapes were made with a compass and T-square. The design is reminiscent of the work from the 1920s German Bauhaus movement. Its letterforms are built of circles and clean lines what make it more legible readable and clear.

Critical Debates in Design.

A little bit of research -
Family Classifications of Type.

Since the time of Gutenberg, the typographic form has evolved with technology, philosophy, and culture. In order to effectively analyze this typographic evolution, the design of type characters over the last five and a half centuries is most often broken down into classifications of common visual characteristics, called families of type:

1 Oldstyle Characteristics
* minimal variation of thick and thin strokes
* small, coarse serifs, often with slightly concave bases
* small x-heights.
* In the round strokes, the stress is diagonal, or oblique, as their designs mimic the hand-held angle of the pen nibs of the scribes.
* The tops of lowercase ascenders often exceed the height of the capital characters.
* The numerals, called old style figures, vary in size and have ascenders and descenders. Many contemporary versions of Old Style typefaces do not retain the old style figures but, in catering to contemporary taste, use lining, or capital height figures.
Old Style examples:


2 Transitional Characteristics
* A greater contrast between thick and thin stokes.
* Wider, gracefully bracketed serifs withflat bases.
* larger x-height
* Vertical stress in rounded strokes
* the height of capitals matches that of ascenders.
* Numerals are cap-height and consistent in size.
Transitional examples:
3 Modern Characteristics
* Extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes
* Hairline serifs without bracketing
* Small x-height
* Vertical stress in rounded strokes Modern example:


4 Slab Serif Characeristics
* minimal variation of thick and thin strokes
* heavy serifs with squared-off ends
* large x-heights.
* vertical stress in rounded strkes Slab Serif example:


5 Sans Serif Characteristics
* little or no variation between thick and thin strokes
* lack of serifs
* larger x-height
* no stress in rounded strokes Sans Serif example:

6 Decorative/Display
For most of type's history, the use of decorative characters was applied to the page design of books, and usually limited to ornamenting title pages, chapter headings, and initials. In the 19th century, the proliferation of Slab Serif typefaces did not ultimately satisfy the insatiable public appetite for distinct and ornate types.

7 Script/Cursive.
Script and cursive typefaces are those designed to literally represent handwriting or hand lettering styles. As a general distinction, scripts have linked or joining lowercase letters, similar to handwriting, while cursive appear as un-joined hand lettering.
Script/Cursive example: