Towards the beginning of the summer I wrote a little about my internship here at Worthwhile, so I decided to do a little follow up since I’m now closer to the end than to the beginning. It has continued to be a great experience for me and I’ve learned a lot. Coming into this internship, [...]]]>

Towards the beginning of the summer I wrote a little about my internship here at Worthwhile, so I decided to do a little follow up since I’m now closer to the end than to the beginning. It has continued to be a great experience for me and I’ve learned a lot. Coming into this internship, I was never sure what facet of graphic design I was most interested in pursuing, whether print or web design. Honestly, I guess I still can’t completely answer that question. But this internship has given me the opportunity to expand my knowledge of designing for the web and therefore has given me more of an option when it comes to which I prefer most. Web design always seemed a little foreign to me before–a little out of my comfort zone. Not saying I’ve come anywhere near mastering it–I’ve got a long long long way to go. But what I’ve learned about web design even over the past week has made me much more comfortable and confident about it.

Designing for the web is quite a bit different than print. Earlier today even this came up as I was working on a web page. There are different objectives–with print, you want the viewer to read or look at what you’ve designed. With web design, just looking at your design isn’t enough. You have to make them want to come back by giving them something to do once they come to the web page, or they’ll probably leave within a few seconds and not come back. Cool looking design won’t cut it by itself–it has to be intuitive and functional. It has to make sense to the viewer and be self explanatory.

So that’s a little more of what I’ve learned. It’s been great working here at Worthwhile. It’s definitely been worthwhile.

This past 4th of July I went down to Atlanta to spend the weekend with some of my brothers and sisters. Saturday morning my brother Caleb and I took our little niece and nephew, Lily and Walker, down the street to watch their mommy and daddy (my other brother and sister-in-law) run in the Peachtree [...]]]>

This past 4th of July I went down to Atlanta to spend the weekend with some of my brothers and sisters. Saturday morning my brother Caleb and I took our little niece and nephew, Lily and Walker, down the street to watch their mommy and daddy (my other brother and sister-in-law) run in the Peachtree Road Race. I was more than happy to stand on the side of the road and watch all the runners go by with my niece and nephew as opposed  to being one of the 55,000 running the 10k. I’ve never really been able to get into running, not for any length of time anyways. Even playing soccer all through high school and my freshman year of college (where running is almost all we did) didn’t get me hooked. But anyways, back to the Peachtree. When there’s a 10k road race on the 4th of July and it happens to be the most popular 10k in the world with 55,000 runners, it can get pretty entertaining, even apart from Lily and Walker squirting Aunt Sarah with water til she was soaked.

When you have that many “runners” in a race like this one, you know not everyone “running” is a serious runner. Those guys are up in front and already finished way before the last wave of runners even starts, like our Kenyan winner who finished in 20-something minutes. Guys like him are entertaining because they’re so fast but your entertainment time is limited because they’re so fast. The most entertaining part is everyone else–the people out there just to make a statement or the army guys and firemen running in all their gear or the hundreds of people who lack the originality to dress up as something other than the Statue of Liberty. It was crazy to see the number of little kids running the 10k. I never could have run a 10k when I was that young…ok so I still can’t. But some of these kids were keeping a pretty hardcore pace–it was impressive. I’m a little confused as to why a parent would let their 10 year old daughter run by herself in the biggest 10k in the world, but regardless it was impressive they could keep up. One of my favorite runners was this dude dressed up as Waldo. Of course when everyone on the side of the road watching saw him they shouted, “I found Waldo!!!” It was somewhat comical.

But after mommy and daddy ran by it started to get hot and the kids started to get a little out of control with the squirt gun so we decided to walk back. It was a good experience. Maybe one of these days I’ll conjure up the self discipline to actually run it instead of entertaining myself by watching all the crazy people run by. I doubt that will happen though.

Hierarchy is the arrangement of people, items, or in our case, type, in order of importance. Without hierarchy, design tends to fall apart and become a big mass of confusion leading to headaches from trying to figure out what is what. I’m sure you’ve seen what I’m talking about, whether it was on a website [...]]]>

Hierarchy is the arrangement of people, items, or in our case, type, in order of importance. Without hierarchy, design tends to fall apart and become a big mass of confusion leading to headaches from trying to figure out what is what. I’m sure you’ve seen what I’m talking about, whether it was on a website that had so much content that it all ran together without any organization or maybe just a small poster or flyer with so many eye-catching elements you weren’t sure what the point was. Without hierarchy, all order is lost.

Thankfully, typography is an easy solution to fixing this problem. Type can be used to set elements apart from each other so that they are organized and so that the most important element catches your eye first.

There are many ways to do this. One of the easiest ways is to simply make it bigger than the rest of the text. That’s what newspapers do. Other ways of doing this include changing the font (make it bold, or italic maybe), changing the typeface (but make sure it corresponds with the feel of the rest of the type), or make it a different color (for example, the heading of this blog post is in red, while the actual text is black). Having said that, one must also be careful not to overuse the big header text or use ten different colors or typefaces-that’s when hierarchy is lost and it all begins to run together. Don’t overdo it. Don’t overemphasize in your attempts to emphasize a little.

When hierarchy is used, you’ll find the text guides you through itself pretty easily. It doesn’t happen by accident. When designing, you have to find ways to get your point across and do it as quickly as possible so as not to lose the reader’s interest or confuse and frustrate them. Using typography to create effective hierarchy is one good way of doing that.

So I’ve been here at Worthwhile for almost three weeks for my design internship. So far, so good-I can’t complain. I wasn’t completely sure what to expect at first, simply because I’ve never worked in an environment like this before but I can happily say that whatever expectations I may have had coming in, I [...]]]>

So I’ve been here at Worthwhile for almost three weeks for my design internship. So far, so good-I can’t complain. I wasn’t completely sure what to expect at first, simply because I’ve never worked in an environment like this before but I can happily say that whatever expectations I may have had coming in, I haven’t been let down…so far. No, but seriously, I don’t think that’ll happen.

I’ve also learned a few things since I’ve been here at Worthwhile-it’s funny how that happens…but seriously, I have. Most people I would say have no idea what goes into the creation of an aesthetic, functional, client-satisfying website. Through sitting in on meetings and listening to design pitches by Dave or four-hour meetings talking about nothing but site content, I’ve started to get a feel for it. But I’m definitely still learning-it’s a long process sometimes-with me anyways. It’s all about the client, and sometimes that can be easy for me to forget for some reason.

I couldn’t have any better office-mates either. I’ll never forget all the long and deep life talks I’ve had with Dave and Leslie at 8 in the morning, mostly consisting of nothing more than  “Good morning” or “I need another cup of coffee” or “Did you see the game last night?” or “I just want to sleep.” But we have a good time. Probably my biggest highlight so far came about a week or less in when Dan finally figured out a nickname for me– “SixPax.” I’m not sure where the significance of the “Six” came from but it has a nice ring to it and it’s original, so that’s always a plus. Once again, I can’t complain.

Overall, great experience so far. I’m excited to see how this internship goes the rest of the summer.