Honestly, I walked away from today with so much more than I thought I would. Even though we were there for more than 2 hours, I felt like I could have listened to him speak all day. He was somehow able to speak about the same topic that entire time and be able to go down so many different avenues of thought. Although I don’t see myself ever in the world of UX, it is such a shame because I would absolutely love to work for Dean.
Even though I said I’m interested in Illustration (and that hasn’t changed), before today I had never truly understood a major reason why. As Dean was speaking, I came to the conclusion that I liked Illustrations and reading story books to see how others tell a story, something that Meena shared as well. So many times have I looked at illustrators’ work I admire and wondered how they decided to make the layout of the page, the perspective they choose, the amount of the page to fill, where to put the text, how the text is presented. These are all things that I still feel very average and mediocre at. I struggle to start projects and decide on composition. When he started talking about the exact placement of buttons and having them be tested for readability, I really related that to my struggle to place things on a page. It doesn’t have to be so complicated!
When we started talking in the end about our project, so many things that he had been talking about started making sense, especially when he was giving examples on the board. I almost feel like I’ve been thinking so heavily about how the employees on the committee will use our word doc template that I had lost what the project was really about in the first place which is to make the document more accessible to average citizens. I had been so worried about cutting information in the original document, but now I realize I totally can! It really clicked when he was talking about the things we read on a website, or rather scan. He was so right about how we don’t read sentences and instead look for the important information! Heck, I even do it myself when I’m reading the document and trying to understand it. It does worry me a bit though, because these are things that we can advise them to change, but can’t actually fix with our designs. It really is up to those who create and write the information that goes into the document to decide what the important information is. Even if it means taking out an “of”.
Speaking of, I was reflecting on the talk and the project afterwards and started thinking about how I should add a subtitle to my agency snapshot page, because as I was clicking through past reports for examples, I was getting confused at what agency I was looking at. They had no mention of the department on that page. As I was thinking about it, I decided it would say
<h1>Agency Snapshot</h1>
<h3>of ‘insert department name here'</h3>
Not kidding, I thought about this for a good five minutes until I realized I could 100% take out the “of”. It is so unnecessary. Very inspiring to be able to ask dumb and simple questions and answer them. I think this talk will propel me to finish this project well!
September 15, 2022