If It Were Any More Obvious It Would Have Bit Me on the Nose! (Graphic Design Elements)

I know this is going to sound silly and may indicate a level of lack of incite but I’m going to say it anyway. When I first started reading the chapters for this week a phrase jumped out at me. This phrase is “A designers approach reflects his or her personal style, methodology, and training as well as the zeitgeist of the period.” The word that particularly caught my attention is zeitgeist. The idea that the “spirit of a period” being an influence on any of the design concepts we have read for this week is not surprising, especially when I think back to our look at typography. The surprising, and somewhat embarrassing, realization I had was that culture too would effect such things.

I say it is embarrassing because it is so very obvious yet I have never really actively thought about it, not directly. Indirectly, sure I have. I habitually got to Chinese and Japanese product and art websites to take a look at how different those cultures web layouts schemata differ, from each other and the West, and how they may function. I, however, have neglected to think the differences I have noted specifically in terms of cultures.

Even just thinking of the surface of the chapter topics, I can see how the structure and historical situation and meaning of the pagoda can potentially affect the semiotic codification of layers for both Chinese and Japanese people as opposed to that of Western people. Additionally paper screen walls will affect both layers and conceptions of transparency for Japanese people with greater strength than would the solid opaque walls historically common to the interiors of western homes.

Though masonry is common in Japan, it does not dominate the history of architecture as it does in the Euro-Western world or with the strength it has even in china. This could effect the way modularity is perceived or thought about in all three cultures. Taking apart the wall of a castle or an inn with ones mind is not the same as dismantling the tongue-and-groove constructions that were common in relatively the same time period in the far east (of course making allowances for The Great Wall).

The grid can be examined buy looking at traditional writing practices and the direction one reads. Left to right is the Euro-Western standard while right to left or top to bottom are common in the east. Likewise, crop types may effect this as well. Though most any crop in any place in the world are planted in grids with rows the dominance of the sunken rice patty would have its influence.

At this moment, I am at a loss for a comparable technology for pattern other than the types of textiles used in the west as opposed to the east. Cultural dyeing and weaving technologies  may have an effect. The differences in woodcut block printing most certainly would.

Employment of these methods and modes of design may, in the end, largely look similar but there are nuanced differences resulting from a cultural subconscious. Now, with the formally situated field of design there can be more standardized approaches to these elements, which is, as I understand it, partly what technical communication looks at.

In recognition that I am entering, inch by inch, the culture of design, the culture of technical communication, I will now not only begin looking at these things in terms of ethnic cultures, but in terms of design and non-design as well as technical and casual communication cultures as well.