Graphic design
Content for Tuesday, September 3, 2024–Friday, September 6, 2024
Readings
- Chapter 5 in The Truthful Art (Cairo 2016)
- Chapter 4 and Chapter 27 in Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Wilke 2018)
- Cédric Scherer, “Colors and emotions in data visualization”
- Lisa Charlotte Muth, “Emphasize what you want readers to see with colors”
- Lisa Charlotte Muth, “A detailed guide to colors in data vis style guides”. You can skim this—this is a good resource for future you.
- Summary of CRAP graphic design principles from Presentation Zen (Reynolds 2008). These principles are from Robin Williams’ The Non-Designer’s Design & Type Books (Williams 2008), which you should really get if you’re interested in doing anything design-related ever. Her stuff is life-changing.
- Typography in ten minutes. The rest of the Practical Typography book is phenomenal and you’d be remiss if you didn’t read the whole thing and bookmark it for life, but for now just read this quick summary.
- Font Matrix – See & Pair Typefaces Like Never Before. In the videos, I mention that you should use contrasting font families, like choosing a sans serif and a serif font. But in reality, mixing fonts well is more complicated than that. The designer here presents something called the Font Matrix that will help you find good font combinations.
- “What’s the Difference Between JPG, PNG, and GIF?”
- “File formats explained”
Possible questions to reflect on
Remember, you don’t need to answer all of these—or even any of them! These are just here to help guide your thinking. All that matters is that you show good engagement with the readings.
- Why does graphic design matter when conveying truth?
- What makes something well designed (vs. poorly designed)?
Slides
The slides for this week’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.
Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.
Videos
Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here: