Category Archives: design

Design Students: Just One Word

July 24, 2010 Michael LeBlanc 1 Comment

In the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” Mr. McGuire (Walter Brooke) takes young Ben (Dustin Hoffman) aside at his graduation party:

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you – just one word.
Ben: Yes sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben: Yes I am.
Mr. McGuire: ‘Plastics.’
Ben: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Ben: Yes I will.
Mr. McGuire: Shh! Enough said. That’s a deal.

This short scene served to underscore the divide between the young and old generations of that age. The term ‘generation gap’ had just recently been coined. Today, advice is still given, and because of “The Graduate,” it bears much of the generational divide and paternalism that separates adviser and advisee. So it is with considerable unease that I offer my advice to students of design who are concerned about their future, post-graduation. Just one word: Web.

Old Guys Do Print

We know that the jobs for fresh graduates are in the digital realms, not in print. A couple of years ago NSCAD design grad and Halifax designer Jeff White posted an entry on his website called “How to Get a Job as a Designer:”

Don’t email all of the companies at one time.

Find out the names of the hiring person at each company you want to work at and address us individually. With the web, it’s really not hard, and shows some initiative on your part.

Don’t email us a big PDF of your work. Many of us receive a big chunk of our email on a handheld device, and downloading a 3MB PDF is a hassle, even over 3G.

There is next to no work for print designers in Halifax at this time. You’ll need (a lot of) web experience to really get in the door. I’d suggest spending the next few months honing your web design skills. Put together a killer portfolio online, find some non-profits looking for a designer, and go after them. We’re all looking for designers with fresh ideas who also understand how to code XHTML/CSS/Actionscript and everything else. Being a multi-talented designer will keep you employed.

Yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, the majority of students seem to be avoiding digital media. Real media is all the rage: the Craft Division can’t keep up with the demand for “book arts” courses. In design, print and product design are the stars of the show.

Design graduates who are qualified to do web design are reporting back to us that they have been successful landing web design work, and striking-out in their attempts to break into print and other design areas. The reason for this is simple: ‘old guys’ do the print stuff. They have years of experience and they’re unfamiliar with web design. So for students in design school, the key to their future success is one word: Web.

404 Course Not Found

Around the same time as his “How to Get a Job” posting, Jeff discussed “The State of Design Education in Nova Scotia.” I consider Jeff a very knowledgeable commentator—he’s taught two of our web design courses. In his post, he criticized design educators in general and NSCAD in particular for not paying enough attention to web design:

One thing a former student mentioned was the need for a more intensive studio-level course in web design. I couldn’t agree more. A dedicated course in web typography…is also absolutely essential…

…So what can we do? As industry members we have a responsibility to push our educational institutions to provide up-to-date and appropriate courses for students. We’re the ones who will reap the benefit. Just the other day I sat in the office of the president of a major local web developer who was crying for at least two web designers with front end coding (XHTML/CSS/Javascript) capabilities. I was able to think of only one person and he’s not even from our city. Industry groups like the GDC and ACIMA also need to get more involved in the students side of things, and the student side of ACIMA is something I’m going to be working towards next year. The GDC doesn’t seem to have much interest in the web at all, but if enough of us got involved, maybe we could change that.

NSCAD’s Bachelor of Design program has a web design course that is a requirement for graduation. It teaches students XHTML/CSS and how to create web standards-compliant websites. But Jeff has a point. Where are the other web design courses that provide more in-depth opportunities and experiences?

Intermediate Interactive Design

404 Page Not Found screen — 404 page from myfamouswebsite.com

It’s no wonder that some people complain that NSCAD doesn’t educate its designers in web design: it seems as though only one, the Intro course, is ever taught. Intermediate Interactive Design is the follow-on course to the required introduction course, and we offer it every year. I teach the course when I can, and I love it. The course is an examination of the historical and theoretical foundations of interactive design and communication, with practical studio projects, such as learning how to install and develop websites using a popular open-source content management system, Joomla. We read and discuss some of the seminal articles in hypertext, user interface and information architecture theory and practice. Students have opportunities to learn new software and techniques, and to apply this knowledge to solving practical problems.

The course last ran in 2009 and may not run in 2011. But don’t blame NSCAD: the course was offered in 2010, and when only five students enrolled, it had to be cancelled.

The course is being offered again in Winter 2011 but only four students have enrolled. It risks cancellation for the second year in a row.

There is only so much that we, those of us from the older generation, can do to encourage young people to benefit from our mistakes and take advantage of our insights. When we do this too forcefully, we risk sounding paternalistic, or, even worse, irrelevant. Students know that they will leave university heavily in debt, and because they are paying for their education with much of their own hard-earned cash, they expect value for their money. And at the moment, students don’t seem to value web design.

What Kinds of People use Internet Explorer?

May 10, 2010 Michael LeBlanc Leave a comment

In addition to chairing the lively Division of Design at NSCAD, I maintain a design consultancy where I oversee and sometimes produce web sites with topics ranging from academic to health-related. Google Analytics is a useful tool and although I don’t make use of it the same way web marketers do, I routinely look at the stats of my sites. The other day I wondered if certain sites attract users of certain browsers, and if there was any way to predict what browser they would be using by the site’s content?

I have a pretty good understanding about what kinds of people visit my sites, and for what reasons; I’ve been working with the Kurt Weill Foundation of Music since 1997 and Origin Biomed since 2001. Other sites are my own, including this blog.

I graphed statistics from the following websites:

ericaldwinckle.info: This is a biographical site on Eric Aldwinckle, an official Canadian WWII war artist, illustrator and designer. Typical visitors to this site are looking for information on war artists. Some of these visitors are students, and others are interested in history or art. Average age is around 35 years.
kwf.org: This is the official site of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, based in NYC. Like ericaldwinckle.info, visitors to this site are interested in the arts, and may range from students and music professionals to music lovers. Average age is around 35 years.
this blog: Most of the google searches that hit this site are related to inquiries about the Arduino platform, but a significant proportion of visitors are interested in design or NSCAD University. Visitors to this site are similar to the two above, with the added Ardiuno ‘geek factor’. Average age is the same: 35 years.
nscadlab.ca: The NSCAD Design Lab is a client-based projects and research lab. Visitors to this site are interested in NSCAD and Design. Average age of these visitors is around 35.
mullercustom.com: This is a ‘boutique’ home renovation company in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Their clientele are homeowners, average age: 40.
originbiomed.com: This is the corporate website for a natural health products company based here in Halifax. Their main product is Neuragen, which is used by diabetics and others who suffer from neuropathic pain. The average age of these visitors is around 60 years.
wtsmed.com: We’ve worked with this Vermont-based natural health products company for 6 or 7 years. While I’ve not been involved in the design of the main website (the company founder is nervous about changing something that he believes works well), I’ve consulted on several sub-projects for this company, and I get to look at the stats. Typical visitors are naturopaths and other medical practitioners and the general public that is interested in maintaining good health. Average age is around 45 years.

I also included a ‘baseline’ measure from wikipedia which is a median of several reputable browser statistics sites (dotted brown line).

Some Observations

Considering visitor age, it appears that older visitors tend to use Internet Explorer, which younger visitors are more likely to prefer Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

In terms of interest, it looks like the more “artistic” visitors have switched from IE to Firefox, and visitors interested in this blog tend to be early adopters of the Chrome browser (presumably because of the ‘geek factor’ inherent in anything Google makes).

A PDF version of this chart is here.

Arduino, design, electronics

Testing Results: Oil Level Fuel Gauge

April 17, 2010 Michael LeBlanc Leave a comment

Testing the new sensor array — Testing the new array

In “Fun with Reed Switches” I mentioned that field testing of the Fuel Gauge system (as originally designed) was unsuccessful. I attributed the failure to the sensor array, which uses latching hall effect switches. I suspect that the hall effect does not work with extremely slow movements, such as that of the mechanical gauge on the oil tank.

So I set out to replace the hall effect array with reed switches. The switches are surface-mounted on protoboard as described here.

I also took the opportunity to completely rework the sender unit, including replacing the Arduino Mini Pro with a minimal ATMEGA8 chip using its internal oscillator. I’ll save my Mini Pro for another project that either requires the 16 MHz clock speed or its 16kb of program memory.

In the original design, the entire unit enclosed the mechanical gauge. In the new design, the sensor array and the microcontroller/transmitter are separate, connected by a ribbon cable.

The Arduino sketch is also optimized (see below). Instead of nested if/else conditionals, I’ve used a much more elegant method. For each sensor level, the system looks for a closed reed switch. When it finds one, it uses bitwise ANDing to match the number of the closed reed switch to a binary value. This binary value is then presented to the transmitter.

/* Oil tank level using reed switches
 v. 2.01 Mar. 21 2010
 by Michael B. LeBlanc, NSCAD University  */

int level;   //the reading from the oil tank gauge

void setup() {
 pinMode(10, OUTPUT);  // warning LED
 pinMode(11, OUTPUT);  // D0 to TX
 pinMode(12, OUTPUT);  // D1 to TX
 pinMode(13, OUTPUT);  // D2 to TX
 Serial.begin(9600);   //FOR TESTING
}

int sensorpin=0;       // What sensor pin we are checking
byte binary;           // This will hold the binary value of the sensor pin
byte D0;               // This will hold the one's bit
byte D1;               // This will hold the two's bit
byte D2;               // This will hold the four's bit

void loop() {
 for (int i=0; i<8; i++)                // Start with sensor 0 and work up to sensor 7
 {
 sensorpin = i + 2;                   // Add 2 to calculate which Arduino sensor pin we want to check
 if (digitalRead(sensorpin) == HIGH)  // If the switch is closed:
 {

 D0 = B001 & i;                     // bitwise AND the binary value of the sensor to mask the 1's bit

 digitalWrite(11,D0);               // write the value to Arduino pin 11

 D1 = B010 & i;                     // bitwise AND the binary value of the sensor to mask the 2's bit
 D1 = D1 >> 1;

 digitalWrite(12,D1);               // write the value to Arduino pin 12

 D2 = B100 & i;                     // bitwise AND the binary value of the sensor to mask the 4's bit
 D2 = D2 >> 2;

 digitalWrite(13,D2);               // write the value to Arduino pin 12
 }
 }

 delay(100);

 // blink LEDs on pin 10 if tank is empty
 if ((digitalRead(10)==LOW) && (digitalRead(2) == HIGH))
 {
 digitalWrite(10,HIGH);
 delay(100);
 }
 else
 {
 digitalWrite(10,LOW);
 }
}

Remote Fuel Oil Tank Gauge by Michael B LeBlanc is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
Contact the writer for permissions beyond the scope of this license.

Intellectual Curiosity