Monthly Archives: April 2011
Graffiti: More than a Crime?
Posted on: April 21, 2011 by Kevin Elko in Culture
Tags: graffiti
Walk through just about any city in the world and you are bound to find some form of graffiti. In many areas of many cities, it has overrun the landscape. From simple personal tags to gang tags, stencils, murals, and street art, graffiti is everywhere. Graffiti has grown from very humble roots, but has permeated through our culture and has become an international art form. Graffiti, in the purest sense, has existed throughout history. There are examples of graffiti etched into the walls of Ancient Rome and Greece. Graffiti as we know it developed sometime in the early 1900s. Many ...
Affordances in Web Design
Posted on: April 12, 2011 by Kevin Elko in Design Technology
Tags: Interface, usability
I was paging through my copy of The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman the other day when I came across the fascinating section on affordances. In the book, Norman describes an affordance "as perceived and actual properties of [a] thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used." It started me thinking about how important affordances are in web design, as well as how much we take them for granted. To Click or Not to Click There are a number of design conventions that are employed on the web to let users know what is cli...
Typography
Posted on: April 3, 2011 by Kevin Elko in Typography
Tags: fonts, type, typography
Typography is at the heart of graphic design. It serves as both a vehicle of information and a visual element, and has the power to make or break a design. While there is no perfect set of typographic rules, there are some general guidelines that should be observed to better foster successful typography. The Anatomy of a Character The smallest element of typography is the letter, but what makes up a letter? Letters in different font-faces look different, but there are a number of structural elements that unify the form of one letter in a typeface to the same letter in a different t...