Name: Nick
Posts by nwanserski:
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- Fig. 1 - Infracta
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- Fig. 2 - Smidge
Where the Wild Things Design
May 8th, 2012Illustrator and author Maurice Sendak, creator of “Where the Wild Things Are”, “In the Night Kitchen” and “Outside, Over There” has passed away at 83. It is an impossible task to catalogue the countless ways Sendak has contributed to our culture. His work is so unique it seeded itself into the smallest cracks of our consciousness when we were young and now yields strange, wonderful things.
But in one thing I am certain; ask any graphic or interface designer who designs for children if they have been personally influenced by Sendak’s work, you will likely meet an emphatic “Yes”.
This is not a simple matter of aping style or technique. While Sendak’s illustrative craft is masterful, it is something deeper those of us who design respond to.
Sendak himself said, “I don’t write for children. I write, and they tell me it’s for children.”
I believe that is the ideal philosophy by which to approach creating any sort of character, interface or design with children intended as the end users. What Sendak did so admirably is understand that kids are as complex, contradictory and philosophical as any adult. While the twin pressures of deadlines and creating a polished product make it is easy to fall into a default design mode of all bright colors and smooth edges, it is worth remembering that it is the rough edges that catch the corners of a child’s imagination. Kids are endlessly questioning, and as such, are often pleased to be confronted with something a little different. To have something a little scary, something a little strange and something a little honest about the world can go far in keeping a child’s attention where it might otherwise stray.
Now all that said; interface design exists in service to instructional design. It is the gelatin that suspends the delicious marshmallows of knowledge in the final product salad. It is not the role of graphic design for children’s software to diverge into confrontational and unsettling places. It must be approachable, easily understood and must not drown out the lessons or curriculum presented. It is not meant to be a ‘Wild Rumpus’.
But there are countless ways, little touches that you can include into a design that tells kids; you know that they know.
Maurice Sendak was instrumental to my childhood. But I’m astounded now, as a parent and a graphic designer who works on projects aimed at school kids, how instrumental he is to me as an adult.
Thanks, Mr. Sendak
Gathering Clouds
February 28th, 2012OnLive is a service that first came to my attention as a cloud-computing based gaming service. Instead of having a dedicated game system or maintaining a home computer capable of running sophisticated software, OnLive streams a video game from a remote server to an adapter plugged into a TV, laptop or even a tablet. The argument is cloud gaming will circumnavigate the planned obsolescence built into so much of our consumer technology and provide the consumer a high-end gaming experience minus the cost of constant hardware upgrades.
While my formidable backlog of Colecovision games keeps me from trying OnLive, it is certainly a noteworthy exploration into the possibilities of this developing technology. However, the market for dedicated gaming of this caliber, while broadening, mostly appeals to something of a niche consumer.
But streaming games has provided the foundation for something of much broader appeal. This past January saw the release of OnLive Desktop, a free app that allows a cloud-streaming Windows 7 interface, fully functional and complete with Microsoft Office suite, to an iPad.
Word and Excel, the ubiquitous PowerPoint and even humble lil’ Paint, all for free. Additionally, for the premium version of five dollars a month, access to 2 GB of cloud-based storage and perhaps most interestingly; Internet Explorer with full Flash viewing capabilities.
Indeed, one of the last taboos of the iPad has been broken. One can now willfully view a whole gamut of flash-based media; and by accounts, quite speedily due to Onlive’s 1 gigabit-a-second internet connection.
This prompts a fascinating discussion on what it might mean for how technology is designed. OnLive and OnLive Desktop demonstrate an alternate path to the annualization of tech, of the endless expense just to stay atop constant churning advancements.
Though, that said, with all due consideration of cost: Adobe’s inevitability, Creative Suite 6, will have an increased focus on cloud delivery; emphasizing monthly licensing fees over a one-time product purchase. Consumers will still pay, but it will become a very different consideration if something merits a regular monthly fee. Intermittent users will likely save money by subscribing to cloud services, while there is a real possibility of regular users seeing an increase in cost over the lifetime of a license.
A final concern, though not the greatest: How will my young daughter feel, knowing a picture of her running amok in our living room in nothing but a diaper and over-turned bowl of spaghetti on her head, is on some remote server farm in California, instead of safely on our home computer where she can delete all traces before we can ever show her friends?
Game development for browsers -Now in 3D!
October 25th, 2011Adobe has recently announced that October will see the release of their newest Flash player, version 11.
The major emphasis of this release is an update to the player’s 3D rendering capabilities. While 3D capability was first released with version 10.3, this update will supposedly render a thousand times faster, putting performance on par with current generation home video game consoles into a universal browser.
How true this claim is remains to be seen, but Adobe’s enthusiastic push for this update is understandable. The Flash player faces greater competition from HTML 5 and Adobe hopes this update will help pull ahead in two particularly lucrative arenas: mobile app development and browser based gaming.
The phenomenal success of Zygna’s real work simulator, Farmville, has propelled wave after wave of Flash-based gaming accessible through social networking sites. However, due to these games being 2D and fairly simple in execution, they maintain a stigma of amateurism.
To be able then, to leverage the massive user base of Facebook or Google+ with the sophistication of an Xbox or Playstation game is an idea both conceptually and lucratively engaging to many developers.
And where goes entertainment, education is not far behind; appropriating the tools and trappings of recreation in hopes they can be used for edification. While large-scale 3D development is beyond the scope of most educational design companies, the unification introduced now can certainly show benefits down the road, especially in terms of designing sophisticated visual interfaces across a spectrum of technological limitations.
It will be some time yet before mobile and browser development can really streamline the delivery of involved educational software, but it will be coming. And in the meantime, there’s always digital corn to be watered and produce carts in the shape of a tomato to be purchased.
iPad, youPad, we all Pad for iPad
August 16th, 2011A few months ago, I wrote a blog article claiming the iPad, while impressive, is essentially a toy and unfit for sophisticated project work. I stated that as a professional graphic designer with a limited budget, I would not be purchasing such an expensive and ultimately superfluous piece of gadgetry.
Then I immediately went and bought that expensive and superfluous piece of gadgetry.
To soften the edges of my hypocrisy, I did wait until the release of the iPad2, as I was then able to purchase a refurbished first generation iPad for (relatively) less. My first impressions of the device remain. The iPad is slick and too expensive. It lacks important basic functions, and requiring a computer with iTunes to manage the OS is an anathema to the benefits of a tablet. It does many things but excels at few. Also, I love it. I love it, I love it. I sleep with it cradled in my arms like Ralphie and his Red Rider b.b. gun.
So all that said, I have picked up a few illustration and design apps and will discuss my impressions:
Price: free when I chose it, though now it shows up as $5.99 on the App Store. Also, Layers is a premium add-on, necessary for functionality beyond simple messing around.
Adobe so far seems reluctant to really invest in software for the iOS. They have a few attractive-looking apps that work in tandem with Photoshop CS5, but their freestanding apps lack depth. Ideas is effectively a vector-based doodle app. It is very simple, providing an adjustable brush for creating smoothed-out brush marks. There are no shapes, layers, Bezier lines, blending modes, or anything of the sort associated with a vector program. But it was free, and my wife drew a unicorn with it.
Price: $9.99
Pixels Pro has a fairly impressive set of design tools: multiple layers, blending modes, linear and radial gradients with opacity settings, and a very advanced selection of marquee tools. Also, you can export Pixel Pro files as multi-layered Photoshop documents, though at a relatively modest 800×600 72dpi. For all this, I’ve been somewhat disappointed by the one thing I really want from a design app: good brushes.
While the brush tool has all the desired flexibility, width, opacity, shape, flow, etc., I find everything I draw has a somewhat fudgy, pixelated look to it. If one is looking for a more design-oriented app, focusing on shapes and layouts, I recommend Pixel Pro highly. But for sketching, I’m a little let down.
Price: $4.99, which, frankly, is a little nuts.
Sketchbook Pro is the favorite of my design apps. It has a fantastic selection of brushes, with the smoothest, most responsive interface for sketching and building up illustrations. The interface was fairly intuitive when I purchased Sketchbook Pro, but a few updates have made fantastic improvements, allowing increased flexibility in visible menus, interactivity, and presets. Sketchbook Pro can also export as multi-layered Photoshop files, with a nice 1024×768 72dpi.
If one has any interest in using their iPad as a sketchbook, ideas, proof of concepts, or even files that can be refined and completed as full projects in Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro is fairly a necessity. I mean, five dollars? I’ve gotten food poisoning from more expensive meals.
The one caveat with all of these apps is the iPad does not have brush sensitivity anywhere near that of a digital drawing tablet or display. All stroke shapes and sizes are synthesized and will not be as intuitive as using a stylus or good, ol’ fashioned pencil. I still hold out hope for a tablet with a designer emphasis, but in the meantime, the iPad has a lot of delightful design apps. Also, I can play Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery on it, and that game is awesome.
The aforementioned unicorn.
Information in a Post-Digital Manipulation World
June 21st, 2011Photography and photo manipulation emerged practically twins into the world of media documentation. No sooner was a photographer making news by capturing a meeting of Soviet leaders, than a graphic designer was going in post-production and airbrushing in ficus plants over undesirable commissars.
But the conversation on photography and inherent truth has fairly exploded with the advent of digital photo manipulation. While there have always been analog tricks for editing photos, technology kept changes much smaller in scope. Now, it is unlikely a single image makes it past a graphic designer’s or art director’s desk without some digital enhancement.
Of the software required for image alteration, Photoshop is the most well-known. It is ubiquitous. Just as one might wipe away tears with a Kleenex after tearing off a Band-Aid, Photoshop has transcended a mere brand name and become noun, verb, and adjective. For an image to be edited, it has been” Photoshopped”. It’s true; you can Google it.
Photoshopping can be as relatively innocuous as a National Geographic magazine digitally placing the Great Pyramids into closer proximity for a more favorable vertical cover layout. Or, it can be as frightening as Iran exaggerating the number of successful missile launches during a military exercise. Every web or print project has people added, removed, placed against multiple backdrops or made impossibly thin. It is standard practice.
This incessant tinkering creates doubt that compliments the generally distrustful tone of the early 21st century. When anyone with an ideological bent disputes the veracity of a story, it is an easy, and often automatic, first response to claim digital manipulation. It is generally accepted that there is no longer any objectivity in photography.
But that said, I wonder. While photo editing software is common and readily accessible, it can no longer possibly keep pace with the sheer amount of visual information recorded and posted to the web. Digital cameras are inexpensive and fairly mandatory in cellphones. That accessibility has succeeded in creating an almost real-time capture of our daily lives. An image is taken or video shot and within moments uploaded to the web via blogs, social networking sites or image hosting sites. As such, it is hard to dictate the narrative of any newsworthy event if hundreds of eyes are all recording and transmitting the same information.
Just recently we have seen the strength of this democratic control of information in the ‘Arab Spring’ movement. So much information, visual or otherwise, emerged raw and untouched, rough and immediate from the streets of cities witnessing violent change. It is impossible for any one person to dictate the message emerging from a conflict when it is seen instantaneously along the globe; one touch. One click.
I love Photoshop. Mostly for drawing robots, sure, but I’ve done plenty of Photoshopping as well. And while I’m very grateful for this sophisticated piece of software, I take pleasure in there being a very non-sophisticated cantilever offsetting the more flagrant abuses of the medium.
Gone in a Flash
April 21st, 2011Ever since Steve Jobs famously rejected Flash software from his proprietary hardware and his grand vision of a sleek future with no visible screws, there has been much discussion of its proposed successor, HTML5. HTML5 is positioned to replace many of the features currently provided by Flash, with the benefit of being a non-proprietary language. HTML5 is capable of implementing complex animations and viewed as a great solution for mobile devices.
As it is, many of the most common applications for Flash, slideshows and animated menus, are already increasingly handled by scripting work-arounds, with significant progress being made in refining light, non-Flash based video and audio players.
All of this is pretty fascinating, and the idea of sophisticated development tools without the semi-annual tithe to Adobe is enticing. But all the reading I’ve done on HTML5 is, not surprisingly, told from the perspective of the programmer. As a graphic designer, and one who is just starting to feel comfortable within the massive warehouse of potential provided by Flash, I am curious as to the role of the designer in creating for HTML5.
This is not a rhetorical or weighted question. I’m honestly wondering. It’s true that Flash is already dependent on a programmer to implement anything I might create outside of a contained, exported animation. But my provincial mind cannot picture creating a complex series of visual interactions without a canvas to play with.
Will there be an emergence of open-source applications that auto-supply code according to commands, similar to Catalyst or Dreamweaver? Will the designer and the programmer have to work even more inter-connectedly than we already do? (Note: this is not a particular concern for me, as the programmers I work with are both thoroughly decent fellows.) Or as it also seems to increasingly be the case, will the programmer be expected to handle more and more extensive design decisions?
While serious prognostication over the future of technology is a dubious effort at best, I don’t believe Flash is in mortal danger. It is very likely that the scope of the software will be scaled back as multiple, cheaper avenues to web animation evolve. But until there’s an HTML tag for ‘singing anthropomorphic animal’, Flash animation will have a purpose.
A Clean Slate
February 22nd, 2011These last few months the release of a new tablet computer is not really noteworthy. The success of the iPad has catalyzed a new consumer electronics movement, and every tech company with a spare touch screen and Angry Birds license is rushing in to stake a claim on this new, verdant market.
The recent release of the Asus Slate EP121 is noteworthy however, as it is finally remedying what in my mind has been a problem with tablets since their recent inception. Which is to say, they are fantastic toys, but not such fantastic tools.
As a graphic designer/illustrator, the tablet interface has excited me for some time. The interactive similarities to a sketchbook provided too-frequent fantasies of taking a sleek, futuristic pad to client meetings and providing quick, in-depth mock-ups with a portable Photoshop. I would be providing an invaluable contribution to a project’s work-flow, and yes, look supremely cool while doing so.
Sadly, this is not the case. The iPad runs iOS, originally designed for the iPhone, and the waves of upcoming Android tablets run the newly developed honeycomb. Both are operating systems designed for stripped down ease of use emphasizing social networking, e-reading, web browsing, and apps. There are some admirable drawing and vector apps available for these platforms, but they are simply not powerful enough to carry the interface design of an entire project.
The Asus Slate runs a full version of Windows 7, carries a respectfully powerful processor, and emphasizes stylus use over finger swipes. These qualities make it an ideal tablet for running a full Adobe graphics suite. A person can work on files at home or while traveling, then transfer them onto one’s work desktop.
Of course, such functionality has consequence. Starting at $1,000, the Asus is twice the cost of an iPad, and $400 to $600 more than many comparable laptops. A significantly smaller hard drive and reportedly dismal battery life are also legitimate considerations.
That said, I’m excited as much for what the Slate portends as for what it is. I feel graphic designers and digital illustrators have looked on with profound expectation at the tablet market, feeling this is a hardware format almost individually suited to our profession.
I have nothing against play. I love play; I’d be playing right now were I not writing this blog post. I am just as enamored by the iPad’s bio-luminescent seduction as pretty much everyone else. Were I a wealthy man, I’d have six; all displaying the tablemat app and laying on my dining room table. But I am not, and if I am going to purchase a tablet, I’d just as soon have it be an investment into my career as well as a means to look off-handedly superior as I casually doodle away in a crowded coffee shop.
Thoughts? Ruminations? Opinions? Leave a comment.
1% Inception, 99% Perspiration
October 19th, 2010It’s been three months since the movie Inception was released into theaters. So it’s safe to discuss, right?
If you haven’t seen the film yet, I highly recommend it. It’s exciting and strange. Also, it is the single summer blockbuster I know of that benefits from reference material.
The story in Inception unfolds over strata of multiple characters’ subconscious. Each layer hosts a different reality, though they are all bound together, running concurrently, and exerting influence on each other.
This combination of narrative complexity and haunting visual design captured the imaginations of many graphic designers who then attempted to map out the structure of the film as infographics. Being both a designer and a fan of the movie, I’d eagerly explore each one of these graphics. I found that I often had the same two-part reaction:
1. “This is great!”
2. “Wait, this doesn’t actually explain anything.”
I am a visual thinker in the purest form. This is not a boast, as it comes at the expense of all other structured thought. I mention this trait because I’m sure it is shared, with all the corresponding peaks and valleys, with other designers.
Many of these Inception infographics are beautiful to look at. The key thematic elements of the film are distilled into iconic visual cues and organized into a structured, architectural presentation. But after the initial appreciation of style wore off, I noticed that they offered little clarity about characters, places, or sequence of events. Sometimes designers, when creating informational aids, become so obsessed with presentation that the content suffers.
This said, I am glad for the continuing aesthetic exploration of data visualization and infographics. I do not want to present the notion of graphic designers as mindless sensualists who only confuse whatever they are developing (we are, as a rule, a reasonably smart group). I just know in the past, I have had to step away from an idea I was excited to pursue, lest it obscure the message of the graphic.
A thoughtful visual hook will engage the viewer enough to examine information they might otherwise ignore. Or, at its best, a strong visual design can untangle otherwise obtuse information and clarify meaning.
I’ll leave you with two helpful links:
1. New York’s School of Visual Design offers an excellent introduction to data visualization
2. The Customer Collective offers an interesting take on infographics
Graphic Designers are valuable for their ability to provide a strong, unique vision. The trick is to keep it from being so unique we are the only ones to see it.
What are your thoughts? Leave a comment!
How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Graphic Interface
July 20th, 2010Seward Inc. is currently in the middle of development of the Word Learning Strategies (WLS) project ; a program designed for teaching upper-elementary students (grades 4-5) essential strategies for vocabulary development, such as using context clues, using word parts such as prefixes and suffixes, and using the dictionary and thesaurus. The curriculum is multi-platform including print, online, and video resources. The WLS project is a good example of how developments in technology and teaching philosophy have grown in tandem to change how children learn.
The standard teaching model for millennia of pressing lessons onto a wax tablet with a sharpened reed seems to have fallen from favor. Educators and students alike have learned the limits of simple didactic approaches. Now, curriculum developers understand the importance of strong graphic design for reinforcing teaching methods in sophisticated educational packages. Interactive games, mascots, and elaborate interfaces are now common and increasingly factor into a curriculum’s development cycle.
For WLS, we decided on a superhero world for the visual component. Having established a broad theme, it is important to create hero characters that can aid with the lessons while building an aesthetic that creates a more complete, immersive environment.
For example, we created the hero Infracta for WLS. Infracta is the designated avatar for the ‘word parts’ section of the curriculum. The word parts section deals with prefixed, suffixed and compound words—words that can be too large for many young readers. When broken apart into components, these words can be better understood. Then they can be reassembled, the whole meaning made clear.
Infracta is a superhero, and as such, a character of action. There has yet to be a successful hero whose power consists of superhuman sentence-diagramming and grammar structure. But at the same time, no character can beat up a word and send it to prison for being above a fifth-grade reading level. So it became a matter of taking the more action-oriented nouns and verbs of the word part strategy, “large,” “break apart,” “reassemble,” and re-contextualizing the meaning.
Infracta evolved into a creative young inventor. She uses her mind to create a group of small, cyclopean robots named “Smidges.” These Smidges have lasers they emit from their eyes that can cut through imposing or dangerous structures, make sense of them, and weld back together in a more useful form.
In an impressive suit of armor, surrounded by a phalanx of robots, Infracta retains the dynamism of a superhero while sublimating the destructive tendencies of the genre into something a little more enriching.
In this way, graphic design is the proverbial “spoonful of sugar” to help the educational medicine go down. And while students are much too savvy to be fooled into believing they’re not learning (nor should they be), it is the hope of the project that a strong visual hook and cast of characters can engage a student’s mind better and for longer than that old, reliable wax tablet.
