Design and Technology

Another week at work, another blog. The project I am working on has reached a tricky stage and I can only spare a few minutes to write my blog. What I am doing, in layman's terms, is attempting a deep sythesis between image and code, part of a program that I am developing in tandem with my young protégé, Bobby. Bobby is handling the functional aspects of the development, leaving me with the tricky task of dealing with deep graphics.

The art of combining graphical elements with programmed content has a long history in web and software design. But the extent to which these two elements are brought together differs. Early web pages, for instance, had a plain background, a simple format, and used complex graphics only within pictures displayed in separate frames. Nowadays, the challenge is to have design deeply interpenetrate the user interface, to the extent that the user is not even necessarily aware of it.

Just as certain ratios are more pleasing to the eye, the timing and distribution of motion graphics is full of ratios that can be planned out in advance by a designer. Indeed, much of the unconscious structure of the experience of using an interface can be manipulated to great effect.

But to achieve these things, I need to be able to translate quite 2D physical designs into entirely hidden structures of programmed elements. The challenge is not so much the coding itself, but the translation between the world of design and that of this particular techology.

Our in-house designer at Gyroscope, Sheldon, is a very gifted artist. And I can chat to him about the development of designs fine. But to explain how the designs might be preserved in a purely structural realm is difficult. It is not so much his problem with understanding but a jarring of two quite different ways of thinking. And it is all the more difficult because I can never be sure I have "got it" at all. All we can do is wait for the final product and see whether what its effect is! I am looking forward to that moment because things are hotting up here!

Back to work - more later - D