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| Sound idea. Poor design. |
So it's been exactly 3 months since my last post. I've been busy putting together a drawing show, among other things, and I totally intend to post the work from the show and write at length about it (yay for you). But first, I just wanted to tie up this one loose end:
I mentioned in a previous post that from a young age, it was apparent to me that I had poor visual design instincts. In the image above, you can see that in working from left to right, my font size bit off more than my page size could chew, and this might even be true of the drawing itself - it looks like when i got to the tail of the shark, there was a "Whoops - there's the end of the page" moment. But it was good enough for me because, hey, it's all in there, and the viewer will get what I was trying to do, right? Not that I was thinking much about my audience back then....
Anyway, I work at a job doing motion graphics now, where a basic design sense is crucial. And while I still struggle sometimes with it, I can feel my design sense forming as I spend more time in this environment. This leads me to think: is a design sense something that some people have, and some don't? Or can it be learned, like any other skill? And how does this affect the idea of "fated" careers, as in there's something we're "meant" to do, and others that we're not?
Say what you want about the human race, but the human brain is a fantastic and wonderful bit of engineering. It's been shown that there's a division of labor in the brain - this part handles the automatic processes (breathing, heartbeat, etc.) and this part handles language, and this part processes sensory input into something we understand, and so forth. But of course, the most important part of the brain isn't any one of these things - it's the network of neurons that connect them all, allowing them to all share information. I did a quick image search of "neural network" to illustrate this, and, not surprisingly, I came up with this:
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| The internet. Of your MIND. |
It's an image that illustrates a simple network that I found in an article about the internet. Each dot is a different size and color, based on how many other dots it's directly connected to. The ones in the center are big and red, because they're each connected directly to 31 other dots. The dots at the outside are tiny and violet, because they're only connected directly to 1 other dot. It's also organized spatially: center = more connections, outside = less. So let's pretend each dot is a part of our brain. When we're born, the network connections are set up in a way that our DNA says we need in order to survive. The internal sensory part senses that our body needs food, so it sends a message along its connection to the part that pulls the "hungry" lever, which in turn sends a message to the part that pulls the "cry" lever and sends that message to our lungs and vocal chords. As we grow, these connections change - while I'm still known to cry when I'm hungry, my brain knows that the more effective solution is to go check out the fridge, so it sends different messages and pulls different levers now.
What's important here is the strength of these connections - the more parts that are connected to more things, the more effective and efficient those processes tend to be. So let's say that in our picture of the network above with respect to eating, the big red dots in the middle represent the parts of the brain directly associated with food-getting (sensing nutrient levels in the body, smelling food, knowing what food looks like, chewing, saliva control, etc.), and the violet dots on the edge are parts that aren't as crucial to the process of getting food, but nevertheless still connected (remembering that one time you went for ice cream with your parents, your preference of one pizza place to another, etc.). Obviously, eating is a universal thing that everyone has built a strong neural network for, but what about things like visual design, that aren't as prevalent across all human brains?
Knowing what "good" design is is a matter of critically analyzing what you see and making it compelling for an audience. This process works different parts of the brain, like visual processing, empathy, inner visualization, personal experience, etc. How successful you are depends on the strength of the network between all these parts. So can this network be developed over time, become stronger and more effective? I think so. Just like the process of eating changes from when we are born until we become mature, the process of designing can become similarly effective, provided it's cultivated in a certain environment. Does this mean you can teach art? Well, yes and no - you might not necessarily be able to tell someone directly how to be an artist, but you can provide an environment where neural networks for making art can be strengthened. In this way, I believe anyone can learn to be an artist, or a designer - it's just a matter of wanting to do it.
So if anyone can do anything, why is anyone a cook, painter, accountant, physicist, thief, priest? I think it's simply because certain networks in our brains are pretty strong from the get-go, and when we do those activities, they seem "easy" and enjoyable. I don't think anyone's "fated" to be an artist, just because they start out with those networks already being strong to begin with, it just happens to be the path of least resistance. But should the desire to be an artist come about in a person that wasn't born with these networks built particularly well, there's nothing to stop them from developing those networks to a more powerful level than even those who were born with relatively stronger networks. It's just a matter of wanting to do it, and being willing to fight through the frustration of learning.
So, yeah - some day I will be a good designer, even though it's not in my original nature. until then, I'll keep trying to fit stuff on a page until my brain figures out how to do it better....
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