Week 9

Louis Fico

Designing A Digital Portfolio, Cynthia Baron: Chapter 9

Usually, when discussing any issue amongst designers, I tend to be a bit hostile toward their worldview. Often, I find that they don’t spend much time talking about some of life’s most pressing issues; free will, ethics, human rights, etc. Despite this opposition, however, designers know that their writing must be distinct; to the point. I can’t stress this enough. There are far too many novelists that seem to obscure their writing in order to hide a lack of content. As designers, however, we tend to be very busy. We don’t have the excess time to try to absorb extraneous information. The idea of [at first] developing a portfolio without written content seemed a bit foolish to me. Of course, I understand the argument that we ought not allow our designs to drown in an unnecessary pool of conceptions and ideas. However, shouldn’t treat our design and our writing as two mutually exclusive entities. Yes;, they are different; but also, they rely on each other.

Artistic content and written content share very similar properties. Although reading text and observing artwork are activities that relate to two distinctly different modes of experience, the shared properties of each help to blur the radical dichotomy often places between artistic expression and the enunciation of ideas. When an intellectual writer sets about the construction of his or her argument, the flow of their ideas will doubtless adopt some of the aesthetic properties of their design.

One of the most essential points of chapter 9 is that the author treats each written component according to its own nature. This is a somewhat naturalistic approach. Every organ in your body has a function for which it is well adapted. Shouldn’t the same apply to your written content? The sequential, yet divergent, developments in our design writing (i.e. identifying our work, introducing ourselves, enunciation to the audience), are to be treated as the broad embodiments of our actual design. Perhaps I’ve already exhausted the meaning of the phrase “written content,” yet I feel that the proper use of design-writing may only be obtained at the price of close attention.

Eisenman made a very good point that I ought to talk about thoroughly; don’t state anything that is blatantly obvious. My contention is that this is a far too sweeping generalization. One of the most striking observations that I’ve made during the past four years is that common sense isn’t too common. Among the plethora of software tutorials that I’ve watched over the past few years, a large proportion of them seemed to begin with the phrase “Open [insert application here],” as if this first premise wasn’t blatantly obvious. Apparently, this first premise is often forgotten. Nevertheless, this chapter seemed crucial in determining the content of our descriptions.