Katrin Becker
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EDER 679.12
Reading Response 3
Last update: Wednesday, February 04, 2004 03:15 PM

Back to 679 main pageComputer Based Learning II

Week 3 Jan. 28
Coloring Outside the Lines?
Why are Graphics fundamental to Multimedia?
Assigned Readings
1

Misanchuk, Schwier & Boling: Color
2
Misanchuk, Schwier & Boling: Graphics [My Response]
3
Mandel, T. (1997). The Interface Designer's Toolkit. In Elements of User Interface Design.  [My Response]

Additional References
1
 ../461/Notes/FileFormats/Scientific-GraphicsFormats.html [A brief discussion of raster vs Vector, and a bit about file formats]
2
 (Budgen, D. 1994) Budgen, David, "Software Design", 1994 ISBN 0-201-54483-2 Addison-Wesley {Note: where I first learned about Wicked Problems}
3
 (Weinberg, 1998) Weinberg, Gerald M., The Psychology of Computer Programming, Silver Anniversary Edition, 1998, Dorset House Publishing ISBN: 0-932633-42-0
4
 (Brown, Malveau, McCormick, and Mowbray, 1998) Brown, William J., Raphael C. Malveau, Hayes W. McCormick III, Thomas J. Mowbray, AnitPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures and Projects in Crisis, 1998, John Wiley & Sons ISBN 0-471-19713-0
Response
Mendel:

This is a wonderful chapter. I really like the lists throughout, and it has prompted me to think more carefully. In some ways this article summarizes much of what we have been discussing about design up to this point. The authors remind us that 'content' is more than the words and pictures we put in our pages. Everything we do in an application communicates in some way.

For me personally, it means that my designs end up taking longer because there is more to consider. However, I think they have improved as a result. I think I am finally getting the "hang" of colour. My Home web site as well as the Mink Hollow web site use only three main colours: a light cream, reddish-brown, and dark green. I want the sites to look organic and so have chosen fairly natural colours. The colours are not meant to interfere with the other content, but rather to augment it. The links on the site have also been changed to these colours. Unvisited links are green (closest to the common blue), and visited ones are reddish-brown (like the red). I use underlining throughout to mark links - I like links to be obvious. I also chose these colours because I did not want them to clash with or detract from other graphics.

In the past year I have now been introduced more formally to Instructional Design, Interface Design, and Multimedia design. I find it fascinating how many elements of design are similar regardless of what it is we are designing. While the bulk of my personal experience is with software design and systems analysis, I have also had occasion to design: clothing, small buildings, cages and enclosures, dog training, university courses, web sites, and other things. I have also had the good fortune to see the design process in action when applied to the entertainment industry (movies, theater, radio productions, music, and other forms of multi-media), the advertising industry (in-store displays), and others. The range of applications is diverse, yet the design process in each case has significant common elements.

Almost all design tasks share a number of major elements. The exact terminology will change from domain to domain, but the processes remain. In software design, they are (Budgen, 1993):

  1. Requirements: needs and constraints (what is needed)
  2. Specification (what will be done)
  3. ** Design ** (how it will be done)
  4. Implementation (actually making it)
  5. Testing : verification :[are we building the thing right?]; Validation: [are we building the right thing?] (Making sure it was the right thing done right)

Since all of these elements appear in one form or another in almost every single design process, regardless of the thing being designed, it would indicate that lessons learned from applications of various models in other disciplines could be beneficial to the design processes we are currently considering (applications, instructional solutions, interface, etc.). Software design (the current trends in software engineering are just a small subsection) is one area where the design process has been extensively studied and so it has many insights to offer.
The Text:

Of the three examples of "line art" given in the text, only ONE is actually line art. One has filled regions (not lines), and the other is made up of dots (again, not lines). See below. All of the pictures shown below are in some sense drawn - two by hand originally, but only one is in fact line art. All are my own drawings, for copyright reasons, as well as to provide additional examples.
Line Art
Filled
Pixelized
This picture made entirely using 'paint', and using only lines (plus a bit of text).
If you look closely, you can see where the lines were created to "contain" the fill: try the top of the chick's head. This picture was originally a pencil drawing, which was augmented with extra lines after it was scanned. Then it was filled with regions of colour, which means it can't be line art.
A scanned pencil-drawing - scanned as a bitmap. If you look at the original [it's BIG - you'll have to scroll some], you can see how it isn't lines.
Drawings (C) K.Becker
The term "Analogical Graphics" is not a known term in graphics - and besides, the examples aren't analogies, they are metonymies.
Analogy: something that is like something else in some real way: "the brain is a machine" although I personally hate this analogy and think it is wrong. Nonetheless, it is one.
Metaphor: make something like another by speaking of it as if it IS the other, "Pretend this rose is your stomach. We will then dip it in some battery acid to show what heartburn is like. " Yeah, right.
Metonymy: symbolism - using a picture or description of one thing to mean another: e.g. mortar board for education, or referring to a king as the crown; or means poison). It's more like an icon.

This is an issue if we are talking about terminology: then get it right, otherwise don't define it.

In the entire chapter on GRAPHICS, there were a total of 12 references to examples with pictures (4 of those 12 occurred on the same page) on nearly 60 (!) pages. Most pages had NO pictures at all. One would think a chapter on graphics would have LOTS of illustrations. I suspect many people would have difficulty understanding a verbal description of a visual entity. If I were trying to learn about vector vs. raster graphics, this text would not have helped.

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Copyright (C) 2004 Katrin Becker
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