We’ve got the whooole blog, in our hands???
Wednesday, September 17th, 2003
Bryan’s hand is hurt. NOT good news, both because we do not
wish Bryan to be in pain AND because it impacts this librarian’s
lesson
planning. Visually disinterested dunce that I am, it’s taken many
months of regular collaboration and real patience on his part to help
me realize that “designing as a process” is not much different
from “writing as a process.” There’s drafting, response, revision,
response, revision, and all importantly, a sense of audience, and publication. The
realization has just started to influence my teaching (’partnering’ is
a better word) of the SLAC-er student group. Sometime this fall, we’re going to get Bryan up here to hang out with the ‘blog rats,’
as they are sometimes so fondly described. So everybody channel flakey healing
energy out toward Bakersfield.
The two designs below come from the SLAC-er web team: the first our
Crash and Burn Cafe
announcement flyer, and the second a
slight modification of a Bell template made for Galileo. (In the
original edBlogger’s arm is a GIF, moving up and down.) At some point,
I need to make a
video of these dudes’ creation process. There’s a lot of idea bouncing
and
conversational back and forth. The drafts of the image get all
kinds of responses in a blog discussion group. There are printing specs
that get discussed and particulars for different versions for different
purposes. Bryan pops into IM for a quick look-see and drops
the students a comment. Energy is renewed and efforts increased. I find
myself so impressed by the work, I show it to the office staff and they
tell me to put color reproduction of the flyers on the school Kinko’s
account. The school will get plastered today with 40 color repro’s and
many more black and white versions.
The point here is simple. Just as teachers of writing should write,
teachers of design should design - or at least hang out with a designer
often enough to get a feel for it. And design in this world of digital
paper is an important part of writing. It requires the same sort of
reflexive process as writing, the same sense of audience, the same
attention to detail.