I came across this blog via “.net” magazine.
It seems to me that if you’re a designer, a proper designer not someone who learnt Photoshop in between phone calls, then design runs through your veins like Pantone 7418. But more than that, it’s there in every aspect of life. You can’t stop looking at things through your designer eyes. Everything you do is clouded by this thing that lives inside you.
It really took me back to when I worked as a graphic designer. Everything I saw I viewed as a piece of design. Road signs with inconsistent leading or kerning really annoyed me. Incorrectly centered text would grate and I’d want to correct it immediately.
Similarly, I’d keep things in mind that had good design, be it a piece of packaging or a business sign. It would inevitably find its way into my own work.
One of my party tricks would be to name fonts from book covers or food packaging. I couldn’t help myself. It was an obsession.
These days, the names of fonts have been replaced with PHP syntax and the eye for good design has been replaced with an eye for neat, compact code but a small part of me still wants to go out at night and fix all the bad design I see on a daily basis.
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May 8, 2007 at 8:16 pm
nitr021
Never knew you were working as a graphic designer.
what made you change your mind into developing IPB?
May 17, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Tim Dorr
I do the same thing with usability design. For example, I noticed that the symbol for the lock/unlock lever on a Toyota Camry, the icons they use are only differentiated by a small 1/8 inch sliver of an open lock, versus a closed one. Basically, anyone without good vision isn’t going to be able to tell the difference between the two and you’ll have to use tactile sense to learn which is which.
Same thing with the ticket computers at the movie theatre. The icon they used to show which way to insert your credit card for pickup was ambiguous as to the card going in one side up or the other.
So yeah, these things bug me a lot