Senpai So Far
According to Steve Jobs, Design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works. Some other authors defined it as a process that can help solve a visual or physical problem.
Design is not about making things pretty just for the sake of it, it’s about making the user’s interaction with the environment more natural and complete.
It’s been three weeks and these and more are the things am beginning to understand in a design 101 training I recently started in Senpai Academy. After the onboarding process in the academy, we dived right into learning design and the things it entails. For the first week’s lesson in Senpai I got a better understanding of some of the features of a good design, which are:
· Innovative
· Useful
· Understandable
·Aesthetic
· Un-obstructive
· Honest
· Long lasting
· Thorough
· Environmentally friendly
In some cases during a design process doing too much makes a design lose some of the above features, so a little design as possible is healthy too. Using this newly acquired knowledge my first assignment was to identify a well designed and a badly designed website and give reasons why they are either good or bad.
Another knowledge I picked for the week was the various kinds of designs and the difference between each of them. These various kinds of design function in different ways and no two type of design does the same thing.
Graphic design, this describes an array of different kinds of design and it has print design as a branch.
Interaction design, focuses on digital product and interaction software design, it has User interface design and User Experience Design as a branch under it.
Industrial design, which creates physical products for mass consumption by people.
For week two, we worked on understanding Gestalt Principles like closure, similarities, figure and ground, common region, continuity and many others, what it means and different context where it can be used. The assignment for the week was to create designs depicting some of these principles.
Currently in the third week, and we are already exploring making wireframes with Figma (an online design tool), best practices to follow when making them, importance of using the grid system for design layout and understanding the grid system.
I have been learning at least one new thing every week and am excited to see what comes up next in the following weeks and the things I can achieve with the information.